One Acquainted With The Night

This one has been rolling around inside of me, slowly stewing in my mind and heart for some time now, and I think I've come to the beginning of an understanding about my relationship with myself as an artist at this juncture of my life.

My father is an artist--A painter and a former theatre artist.  The year I was born, he started a children's theatre in my home town, and watched it's inception and growth for ten years after that.  He tells people that he 'dragged me around in a costume trunk' until I could walk.  I have pictures of myself as a baby in one of those carry-all carriers set next to my father painting a backdrop of a set.  The theatre was my playground as a child, props and costumes my toys, and the magic of a story come to life on stage expanded my imagination from a very young age.   Some might argue artistic ability is genetic, can be passed down from generation to generation.  I agree.   More and more, I am realizing, too, not only did I, perhaps 'inheirit' some kind of artistic skill from my father.  Each day I spent with him by his side in his studio, each evening I spent watching him direct play after play, each hardship I watched him endure be that creative, financial, in business transactions, in relationships, and each triumph I celebrated by his side, I was absorbing, from a very young age, the energetic material of life as an artist.

It, perhaps, should have come as no surprise to me, then, that artistic pursuits, especially when hoping to make a living in the pursuit, is hard.  It hurts, there's no justice in the scheme of it all, and it can make you a crazy person.  It can make you want to throw in the towel.

And that is, more or less, what I have decided to do with the past couple of months of my life.  Throw in the proverbial towel--but not like I'm throwing up my white flag of defeat and giving up forever--rather, I've decided to take a breather from the rat race that is pursuing a life in the theatre.  I've come to the conclusion I need to dig deep and ask myself some important questions.  Do I want to do this right now in my life?  What was I drawn to in the first place?  Can I do something else and be happy?  What else makes me happy?  Why do I do what I do?  What do I want out of a career in the theatre?  I have begun to parce out what serves me as an artist and a person, and what have become unhealthy attachments in the pursuit.  I'm beginning to realize my desperation for wanting to pursue a living as an artist has tainted my artistry.

No one can prepare young artists for the heartache and successes, the milestones of highs and lows one will experience in a year of the "pursuit," let alone a lifetime.  No one could, certainly, prepare artists, let alone, the world, for the economic low we are experiencing.

And so, I'm left, and I'm not the only one, asking these questions...How to do it?  Why do we do what we do?  Is it worth it?  It just so happened, perhaps I needed to go back to my roots to gain some perspective.

Since making the decision to take a reprieve, I have had the great fortune to be accepted by the community that gave me the primary rearing I had as a young artist.  At the age of sixteen, I left home and attended my 11th and 12th grade years at an arts boarding school where I received two years of intensive, pre-professional actor training.  At this school, I was treated like the young artist I was at the time, not as a student.  We read Dante and Tolstoy, we related Physics to Dance, and Visual Arts to Math, we lived together as artists, we worked together as artists, and we were all given the permission to be exactly who we are.  My theatre teachers there say they were creating an ensemble; they were creating a family.  The other amazing instructors say they were giving us an education, they were giving us a concrete foundation as curious, responsible, active, and creative members of society.  We were to go out in the world, and influence society with our art.  We were to set the world on fire for the better through our art.  I have now been welcomed back in to this amazing place and community, and I help students begin the same journey I embarked upon so many years ago.  It is my job now to tell students that wish to expand their world through art that there is a place made just for them to do so.  And it is at this beautiful place where I have been reacquainted with my own creative spirit again.

I have been particularly inspired by two pieces of art that have crossed my path in the past month through my work at my school. These pieces have ignited that fire deep within me to keep my head up, and has reminded me of my worth in this world as an artist--and of all artists.

The first amazing piece of art is the documentary film, Pina - A Film for Pina Bausch, the second is a speech John F. Kennedy gave in 1963 at Amherst College to commemorate the poet, Robert Frost.  Both of these works of art are tributes by artists (I think JFK was an artist--the last of the heart high politicians, I believe) for artists. Both have reignited sparks of inspiration, great and small inside of me, and have helped me remember my responsibility as an artist to myself, my fellow artists, and the world.  Pina reaches you on the micro-level, President Kennedy's on a broader scope.  Both are haunting, uplifting, loaded, and pose a challenge to today's art and artists.

  About Pina:  Watch the film.  It is a breathtaking tribute to the late choreographer and dancer Pina Bausch.  Wim Wenders, the film maker, had been in collaboration with Pina to create a film of her work.  The project had been in the making between the two of them for 20 years, and just as it was finally going in to pre-production in 2010, Pina Bausch unexpectedly and suddenly passed.  The film is comprised of several pieces of which she choreographed and danced during her lifetime as a theatre/dance artist.  It also includes interviews with her international company members, and their own personal physical responses to her as a mentor, leader, artist, choreographer, and dancer.  It is moving, funny, poignant, relevant, challenging...It is a piece of work every artist needs to see, regardless of their interest.  The trailer asks of its viewers, "Is it dance?  Or is it life, love, freedom, struggle, longing, joy, despair, reunion, beauty, strength?"  Her work, under the guise of dance, elicits the nuances of life in, perhaps, one single gesture.  My friend, who watched the film with me, speaks of her artistry better than I ever could,

Pina Bausch, at work.

Pina's dancers all say essentially that she made them better. She made them more beautiful, more confident, and more talented. Most interesting to me was that she elicited this kind of response was by being, for the most part, silent. She made them great by quietly giving them permission to search until they found their own beauty. Pina gave her dancers questions rather than answers. One dancer recalled a time, after a terrible rehearsal, that her only comment to him was "Go on searching." 

Another dancer said that Pina taught him to stand for everything he did - every gesture, every step, every movement. She believed wholeheartedly in a person's need to be authentic and to dance - or maybe to live - with intention.

Pina choreographed using the elements - rocks, water, mountains, dirt. She allowed beauty to be there, and for her dancing to be over it, through it, beside it. She didn't force beauty into a box. 

Pina built a company-- a family of dancers built with trust and shared vocabulary and passion and love, and from there she could break open the extremes of the human experience, and often she explored those extremes to their utmost, abstract extremes.  Bausch looked at beauty from all levels, she dissected it, and reformed it as something else through her lense.  One of her dancers remarks of Pina as a dancer, "She moved as if she had a hole in her tummy, as if she’d risen from the dead.  When I am onstage today, I try to imagine Pina in her pain. But also in her strength and her loneliness.--all of her pieces were about love and pain, and beauty and sorrow and loneliness."  Kennedy says of Frost, "His sense of the human tragedy fortified him against self-deception and easy consolation. "I have been" he wrote, "one acquainted with the night." And because he knew the midnight as well as the high noon, because he understood the ordeal as well as the triumph of the human spirit, he gave his age strength with which to overcome despair. At bottom, he held a deep faith in the spirit of man, and it is hardly an accident that Robert Frost coupled poetry and power, for he saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself."  All artists have been acquainted with the night, deep, dark, silent and mysterious inside of them.

As Kennedy says in his speech, "When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment."

Throughout the film,  Bausch's dancers remember moments they shared with Pina during her lifetime.  The director so exquisitely put them at ease and caught them at just the right moment.  The ensemble members pour forth such loving, intimate words that honor and uplift the memory of such a compassionate and innovative woman.  

One female dancer says, "Meeting with Pina was like finding a language--finally.  Before, I didn't know how to talk, and then she suddenly gave me a way to express myself.  A vocabulary. When I began, I was pretty shy, I still am.  And after many months of rehearsing she called me and said, 'You just have to get crazier.' And that was the only comment in almost 20 years."

A young male dancer says, "When I was new to Wuppertal (her company), and confused about some things, she merely said, 'Dance for love.'"  

And, boy, do we need to hear that more often in today's society.  Everyone.  Not just artists.  Don't forget to do what you do out of love. The heart, especially the artist's heart has an extremely large capacity.  Out of this great heart really springs forth every other human emotion possible.  In truth, all art is a means through which to connect our hearts, I think.  Pina was certainly one acquainted with the spectrum of human spirit and heart.  She and Frost were ones "acquainted with the night."  And they let their human experiences bleed forth, compassionately into their art for all to witness, and share and impart and enjoy.

Pina gave her company permission to crack open.  To get crazy, to move around and through obstacles, to move in abstract ways, to emotionally engage in the work and movement.  She validated their life and work as artists.  JFK gave the artists a voice amongst our nation in his speech.  "I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist," he wrote, "In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost's hired man, the fate of having "nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope."

Wim Wenders and Pina Bausch.

My artistic spirit is being re-acquainted with the high noon again.  I am searching for a healthy, fulfilling place to reside with my desire to pursue my craft--perhaps to make a living, perhaps not.  One of my favorite quotes from the great Sufi poet, Rumi, goes like this, "Let the beauty of what you love be what you do."  More importantly, I am making my way back there, back home.  I'm stoking the fire in the underbelly, I am remembering--finding my rightful place--in the great web of artistry before and after me, I am claiming my purpose for who I am meant to be.

I leave you with yet another beautiful work of art.  May it break open something wrought within you, something struggling or longing to be awakened and treated gently, kindly, and sent off with a purpose.  May we all, through art, know like we know the sun will rise tomorrow, that we've much to look backward to with pride, and everything to look forward to with hope.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes, 

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clear blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--

over and over announcing your place 

in the family of things.

                                          

-Mary Oliver