LEAR
In this final quarter I have not done more work on LEAR, the production finished, and I was so burned out by it. Max Baskind was supposed to make a film from the recordings we made, but at this point I have mostly lost hope of that happening. I have all the footage on a flash drive, so I guess I will have to carve out some time this summer to make the film.
This is demonstrative of my biggest challenge while working with large groups of people who are not me: the fact that they are not me. When I am creating work by myself, or in very small groups, the accountability is high, and if something doesn’t happen I take full responsibility. In large groups if someone isn’t fully stepping up to the plate or isn’t meeting my expectations, I can easily brush it off as being only their fault OR I can just ignore it because there are bigger parts of the piece that I can be working on. I like to expect that I should only have to say something once and it will happen, but that isn’t always the case, because others work differently from me.
LEAR was a really powerful experience for me, it was such a big project, and it was a lot for me - I don’t think I will be making, or thinking about making, something of that size for a while.
In this final quarter I have not done more work on LEAR, the production finished, and I was so burned out by it. Max Baskind was supposed to make a film from the recordings we made, but at this point I have mostly lost hope of that happening. I have all the footage on a flash drive, so I guess I will have to carve out some time this summer to make the film.
This is demonstrative of my biggest challenge while working with large groups of people who are not me: the fact that they are not me. When I am creating work by myself, or in very small groups, the accountability is high, and if something doesn’t happen I take full responsibility. In large groups if someone isn’t fully stepping up to the plate or isn’t meeting my expectations, I can easily brush it off as being only their fault OR I can just ignore it because there are bigger parts of the piece that I can be working on. I like to expect that I should only have to say something once and it will happen, but that isn’t always the case, because others work differently from me.
LEAR was a really powerful experience for me, it was such a big project, and it was a lot for me - I don’t think I will be making, or thinking about making, something of that size for a while.
Semester 1
I made a play. It was an adaptation of King Lear. I have been working on it since the beginning of last year. It is my most ambitious project to date.
I do not feel ready to really unpack the process. It burned me up at the end. I haven’t recovered. When people try to talk to me about it I do not want to. I think it will be a few months before I am ready to.
The process was so fast. I had been researching and thinking for many months, and then pretty much made the play in 3 weeks. I wish I had had more time to develop it. I would have liked to spend much longer working in the text with the actors, unpacking the scenes and stripping them down as a group. As it was I did short workshops of scenes with the cast and then cut them down to shreds by myself.
It was a fully realized piece, and it was a finished one when it was performed, but I would have been happier if I had spent more time talking about it as a whole artwork, and as a series of truthful moments, with the performers. It was terribly rushed. I could see and unpack the depth that I put into it, but I am not sure if the actors could.
Setting my work of the bodies of others was often frustrating. They are not me. They cannot be me. It also brings a richness to the work, no body is the same as any other, but I still struggled. In the end I had to just stop trying to own it. I handed the dances over to the performers and settled.
When I watched the public performance, I felt like I was going to throw up the whole time. I made LEAR for myself, it was what I wanted to see, and I gave it away to the audience. This hurt. In the end I had to give it up entirely, I had to stop caring about it the way that I would something I am was performing myself, because I was too close to it, and because I could see the entire thing and everything that went wrong.
LEAR was well received at U-32. It was not as well received at festival. I was disappointed by this. I could unpack the reasons why it wasn't well received at festival, but I won’t. When my immediate community saw it they loved it: that is what I am telling myself I care about most.
This is the end of it. I don’t think I will ever revisit Lear. It is too much of a classic, and others have too many opinions about it for me to be really comfortable taking it on.
Video and Photos Coming Soon
Semester 1
This spring my production of King Lear will be presented as Stage 32’s mainstage show, and attending the Vermont One Act Drama Festival. I spent last year working with King Lear, creating cuts and visioning for the production. This year I have continued to do so.
Recently I have been reading about tragedy, madness, and gender in Shakespeare to inform the production. In addition I have been exploring movement techniques and styles, as well as aesthetic qualities that I hope to employ during the show. This quarter I created a very rough cut to begin the creative process with.
The challenge of this piece will be the fact that King Lear is a play that simply does not fit into an hour and retain all of its glory. I have to let things go that I love no matter what. But I have decided to call this “a play about King Lear” instead of a production of King Lear, this gives me much more flexibility with how I frame the production and what material I actually present. Currently I believe that my production will be movement based, and draw from sections of the script, synthesizing sound, movement and spectacle to create a politically charged and angry performance. I plan to work with the actors to devise the performance, and not rely heavily on the script that I begin the process with.
As of now I have cast the show and we had our first meeting as a group. I’m wicked excited and it seems like the people around me are too.
Being a student director for stage 32 is different than any other directorial position I’ve had because I am not the primary organiser. Which has both pros and cons. I am much more supported in the creative process than I ever have been, but at the same time I can’t be making work with the same freedom that I might otherwise, this is a high school production, and there is only so much space for the avant-garde. (Although that is not to say that this production isn’t pushing boundaries, it’s definitely pushing some people’s, just not mine as much as usual.) And there is an expectation that I will be creating something that pushes these boundaries, I’ve had conversations with Ben Heintz, Lisa LaPlante, and many of my peers, all of which left me a little uncomfortable, because my vocabulary didn’t line up exactly with that of the other participant on the conversation, where my experimental work is normal to me, it is abnormal to some others.
I have continued to research King Lear this semester, and have come across some really great materiel. I got a copy of a book of adaptations of Shakespeare, which had both a very modern adaptation, Lear’s Daughters - focusing on the daughters and the fool (I saw a production of at Edinburgh Fringe, which was the beginning my Lear journey), as well a much older text, that has been edited to have a happy ending - where Cordelia and Lear don’t die.
In the coming weeks we will begin to rehearse in earnest and put together the production. While I have always had the intention of letting the work with the actors shape the piece, over winter break I made a clean draft of the structure of the play, which does a pretty good job outlining exactly how the play will work. The scenes that I have selected to workshop deeply with the actors fall mostly towards the beginning of the play, and will give us all a chance to have fun and experiment with the language, without having much pressure to be making tons of materiel as a group.
I am super excited to see my vision manifest on the stage, and I am excited to be able to sit back and watch the show when it is ready, this will be the first production that I have made that I will not be performing in or running tech elements during the performances. I am excited to watch the play grow from the limits of what I can imagine into a communal project that is owned not just by me, but by each and every person who works on it.
Recently I have been reading about tragedy, madness, and gender in Shakespeare to inform the production. In addition I have been exploring movement techniques and styles, as well as aesthetic qualities that I hope to employ during the show. This quarter I created a very rough cut to begin the creative process with.
The challenge of this piece will be the fact that King Lear is a play that simply does not fit into an hour and retain all of its glory. I have to let things go that I love no matter what. But I have decided to call this “a play about King Lear” instead of a production of King Lear, this gives me much more flexibility with how I frame the production and what material I actually present. Currently I believe that my production will be movement based, and draw from sections of the script, synthesizing sound, movement and spectacle to create a politically charged and angry performance. I plan to work with the actors to devise the performance, and not rely heavily on the script that I begin the process with.
As of now I have cast the show and we had our first meeting as a group. I’m wicked excited and it seems like the people around me are too.
Being a student director for stage 32 is different than any other directorial position I’ve had because I am not the primary organiser. Which has both pros and cons. I am much more supported in the creative process than I ever have been, but at the same time I can’t be making work with the same freedom that I might otherwise, this is a high school production, and there is only so much space for the avant-garde. (Although that is not to say that this production isn’t pushing boundaries, it’s definitely pushing some people’s, just not mine as much as usual.) And there is an expectation that I will be creating something that pushes these boundaries, I’ve had conversations with Ben Heintz, Lisa LaPlante, and many of my peers, all of which left me a little uncomfortable, because my vocabulary didn’t line up exactly with that of the other participant on the conversation, where my experimental work is normal to me, it is abnormal to some others.
I have continued to research King Lear this semester, and have come across some really great materiel. I got a copy of a book of adaptations of Shakespeare, which had both a very modern adaptation, Lear’s Daughters - focusing on the daughters and the fool (I saw a production of at Edinburgh Fringe, which was the beginning my Lear journey), as well a much older text, that has been edited to have a happy ending - where Cordelia and Lear don’t die.
In the coming weeks we will begin to rehearse in earnest and put together the production. While I have always had the intention of letting the work with the actors shape the piece, over winter break I made a clean draft of the structure of the play, which does a pretty good job outlining exactly how the play will work. The scenes that I have selected to workshop deeply with the actors fall mostly towards the beginning of the play, and will give us all a chance to have fun and experiment with the language, without having much pressure to be making tons of materiel as a group.
I am super excited to see my vision manifest on the stage, and I am excited to be able to sit back and watch the show when it is ready, this will be the first production that I have made that I will not be performing in or running tech elements during the performances. I am excited to watch the play grow from the limits of what I can imagine into a communal project that is owned not just by me, but by each and every person who works on it.
King Lear (2016-17)
This semester I began a study in King Lear. I started out by reading the play and two modern adaptations of it, A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley, and Fool by Christopher Moore. I read sections of King Lear with actors, and worked on fully understanding the plot, characters and language. I was planning on writing an essay on the major ideas and themes in the show, instead I ended up doing a different kind of product.
I made an intense cut of King Lear focusing on the motif of sight, I retained only 8 characters, to keep the play tight and concise. Along with the cut of the play I did a series of character portraits, one for each character I retained. In each picture I portrayed the character. Posing as each of these full rich characters was interesting, it was a micro performance for me, developing my understanding of each character.
Next semester I plan on working with actors on my cut and possibly stage a few scenes. I will also read essays about the play, and make another, different cut.
This semester I have continued to explore King Lear. I focused on creating cut of the script that was radically different from what I have done before. This was because King Lear is a very long play, and the approach I usually use (In which I create a new document with the entire script in it, and go through, combing away that materiel that I don’t want to be part of the story that I am telling with the show) was not working due to the length of the play.
Instead I took a new approach, inspired by playwright Charles Mee, who write modern or new interpretations of old works such as The Odyssey, and other classics. His writing style is very distinct, and one that I identify strongly with. So during a Thursday writing band I sat with a paper copy of King Lear, and an empty document, and simply began to type exactly what I wanted into it, taking artistic liberties, and creating a document that is considerably shorter than any cut I could create the traditional way.
I was disappointed with myself because over the course of the quarter I did not finish the new adaptation, due to lack of time, but early in quarter 4 this should happen, because I would like to have a third cut ready by the end of the year.
In addition to the work I did with the text, I read and watched media relating to King Lear. I watched 2 film adaptations, including a Jean-Luc Godard film which radically turned the story on it’s head and stands as an inspiration for the work I do with the play now. I also read an analyzation of the show accompanied by a few essays on the play.
In quarter 4 I completed my adaptation of King Lear, as well as read many of the essays from a book of critical essays on the play, as I outlined in my Quarter 3 narrative.
Other than that though I downsized how much work was done of this project. I continued to engage with Shakespeare through a bit of research on Hamlet, as I am working on a production this summer.