Theater & Community: A Manifesto

A primary beauty of making theater is community. In a society designed to isolate, we need each other to make theater.

The community is often temporary, but it is real. It is sustenance we need.

The community we forge mounting a play requires exposing our individual vulnerability, encountering risk and engaging in mutual support. 

In the absence of trust and safety between theater makers, the community and thus, the play, shatters.

It is as something sacred between theater makers: missteps and gaffes, moments of frailty and weakness, even failed experiments must not result in shaming and attacking.  On the contrary: When one of us falls, we all pick her/him/them up.

The harm a theater maker(s) suffers when shamed or abandoned by a collaborator(s) during the process is profound and can affect their capacity to enter again into theater communities.

Making theater is the fruit of apprenticeship and of learning from those who came before us over millennia. Much of this apprenticeship consists of learning the primary lesson of mutual care and support - even as it runs counter to the ethic of hyper-individualism and ego-driven behavior found elsewhere in society.

A primary beauty of making theater is community. In a society designed to isolate, we need each other to make theater.

 

"Bandcamp Friday"

 

Today, Friday, December 2, is another "Bandcamp Friday." This means that if you purchase something digital or otherwise on Bandcamp today, the artist receives 93% of that money, while 7% goes to "processing fees and charges." When it is not "Bandcamp Friday," Bandamp takes a 15% cut off the top. I imagine that what this means for 98% of musicians who put shit up on Bandcamp is that listeners might go to an artist's page and stream portions of a couple of songs for free and then not buy anything. That's what I do sometimes – unless I have some available income to spend and the artist is not rich and famous and is, additionally, important to me personally. Then, it feels good and supportive to send 10 bones to an artist. And like most financial experiences in the life of an artist who has not penetrated mass culture, the money earned translates into burrito money, coffee money, train fare, money for guitar strings, notebooks, pens.

That's OK for me. How could I complain? At 55 years old, I have lived longer than so many artists I've known. And through chance, privilege, sacrifice and (I imagine) through a flurry of synchronistic (spirit world?) factors of which I am not even aware, I have had the time and energy to create things throughout my life. Creating occurs in dialogue with all of, well, creation, with your fellow living artists/writers/historians/thinkers, with those who have come before you, with the unseen world and in dialogue with yourself. Who are you? What is your voice in relation to that of the crow on the wire in the alley behind your house, in relation to the sun rising over the Atlantic & glimpsed from a cloud ringed mountaintop in Madeira, where your ancestors lived for 500 years?

You walk around grateful for and dialoguing with the chance mixture of weird gases that conspired to birth life on the planet -- resulting in waddling penguins and diving-swimming otters who seem eternally happy. You walk around grateful for and dialoguing with Thelonious Sphere Monk and the decades of sacrifice and study he pursued that permitted him to develop a piano language to which you can listen for all of your life.

Sons of Kemet

The brief poem below was written in the Johns Hopkins mood disorders unit in 2018 while recovering from a life-threatening medication mishap - two bouts of serotonin syndrome followed by abrupt withdrawal of an SSRI which I'd taken long term. Although my body, spirit and mind felt alternately lifeless & out of control for those 10 months of illness, some small part of my self or mind - which I cannot locate precisely - remained sufficiently functional to focus sometimes on reading and, very occasionally, on brief writings. How strange it was to write and not feel inspiration in my body, but know it was important to activate that zone of my mind that still functioned occasionally. The neurological memory of decades of creating and taking in creative things persisted inside me in an almost shadow form, a shadow form that actually worked, it turns out. And what remained of my rational mind recognized these brief episodes of functionality as a sign of a possible future for me outside of the hell gates of ultra-panic and depression.

A woman 103 years old

From Barbados

They memorialize

In the steady rain drop

Fall of snare drum rimshots

And a tuba bassline

That struts

A 4-note step

And modulates up

A queen is a saxophone

Story proclaimed atop

The drum

& tuba march

SAX SAYS:

“Ocean”

"Shore" ”Walk”

"Speak” "Breathe”

Bioregional Travel

There is no bioregion on Earth that is boring. All are dynamic and full of inexhaustible mysteries. Airplanes are carbon dragons. They are but one of many destroyers woven into the world we were born into, of course. I mean, where to begin? Lives dependent on habitat destruction and the burning of condensed solar energy extracted from subterranean realms. Animal agriculture. “Supply chains.” Millions of square miles of what was once prairie paved over with asphalt made with materials wrenched from other subterranean realms… Returning to sanity and skills that may rescue us from overshoot is a multi-generational process and it is not clear that it will ever be accomplished or accomplished in time. Bodies too fucked up to garden, racked with chronic injury & pain. Children socialized into digital non-habitats, socialized into believing that the marvelous only exists over there and far away. It is not true. 

I have found that addictions cannot be replaced with nothing, only with engagement in other positive and regenerative activities. It is why I propose focusing on travel within one’s bioregion as an alternative to plane travel… Learning a language people spoke in your region before their displacement by the people who came from Europe. Worlds that were here before the destructive project really took hold. Carlos Fuentes called it “the buried mirror” — what lies beneath the Old Navy, the AT&T store, the Chipotle.

Infinite Returns

The hand that signed the writ 

that felled the tree 

that grew the leaf 

that fell to earth 

that fed the roots 

that blocked the road 

that crossed the land 

that caught the sun 

that burned the wind 

that blew the sand 

that reached the sea 

that made the waves 

that hit the shore

held by the land 

crossed by the road 

blocked by the roots 

fed by the earth 

that held the leaf 

grown by the tree 

felled by the hand 

that signed the writ

You Give Love a Bad Name

Bad music from the 80s is still bad

Cars drive off the edge of the continent

and fall into the ocean

Ronald Reagan should have remained in Illinois

and become a professional whistler

"Is that the Chattanooga Choo-choo?"

Inviting Nazi scientists into the country

to build us rockets wasn't a swell idea

Trump is convicted and must work

in the pit of a Pep Boys doing 12-hour shifts

in Poughkeepsie in winter

Wake me up before you go go 

Coming Out as an Anarchist

1/2/23, Monday - A good day to come out as an anarchist. To me this means embracing love, wonder, care, responsibility & curiosity and it means striving to form communities not defined by oppression & exploitation. People feel bad because humans long to live within spaces and networks of kindness and openness, and yet we were born into systems of cruelty and destruction. Being an anarchist also means to oppose with passion white supremacy, patriarchy, anti-queerness & the cold hate gaze of the fascist. For me, to be an anarchist is to remember what we were before the time of the empires - when we lived within the web of reciprocity of life and wisdom traditions, understanding that we & all of creation are sacred.