Pagliaccia

Making Masks (Superhero Edition)

2009-11-01T21:48:00.008-06:00

Halloween happened to be closing night of my show, Hey! Mr. Spaceman!, so naturally the company had a big costume party; and when actors are involved, you know the costumes are going to be serious.

Recently I encountered a terrific bit of advice: "The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible." My costume did, in fact, come from a bit of backstage joking--the idea that my character Violet, having been zapped by Martian rays in this show, would return in the sequel with superpowers. We dubbed this character UltraViolet.

So I set about making an UltraViolet mask. I used papier-mâché, with tissue paper cut into small squares and rectangles, nothing any bigger than about 1" x 2". Tissue paper is great because it lets you create a smooth, almost slick surface, and it's relatively easy to manipulate into the sharp lines and creases you want for a 1950s-style superhero mask.

Tissue paper also leaves you with a good paintable surface, and the product is lightweight--which you want if you're going to have it on your head all night. Manipulating it is a bit like baking with phyllo: you tear it at first, and get little pulpy corners stuck to your fingers, and then you get the hang of it and you can shape it into anything.

For the paste I used the standard mix of one part flour to two parts water, with a few tablespoons of salt to prevent mold from growing on the layered paper. Chicago has been so humid lately that mold prevention was not optional. At several stages I also had to pop the mask into a 250-degree oven for a while; otherwise it took days to dry.

In the show, all the teenage characters drove cars (which Ira Amyx cleverly designed of painted, sculpted foamcore, with handles on the back so we could "drive" around the stage). Violet's Buick had a V-shaped hood ornament.

I decided to use the V as a design element of the costume--the brow of the mask and a weapon-ish detail on the wrist cuffs. The V shape would need an armature for support. I created armatures by cutting long triangles out of index cards and creasing them lengthwise. I had to hold the two halves of each V together with masking tape, but layers of papier-mâché were enough to attach the Vs to the mask and the cuffs.

The base for the wrist cuffs was a very low-tech and low-budget toilet paper tube, cut lengthwise on one side so I could just pop the cuffs on and off. I ran out of time here--the cuffs would have been stronger and stayed on better if I'd added a few more layers of papier-mâché to the tubes. Instead, they got bent pretty easily, and by the end of the night I had to use double-sided tape to attach them.

After the mask came out of its last session in the oven (incidentally, there are few things more Eleanor Rigby-esque than removing a replica of your own face from a kitchen appliance), I used an X-acto knife to smooth out the edges. Then I painted the mask with acrylics. Just as we did in the commedia mask intensive, I added some highlights and lowlights to keep the features from getting lost in a uniform sea of color.

I had planned to attach the mask with elastic, but time was running out. And I thought about the look I was going for--more or less a cross between Silver Age comics and Adam West-era Batman--and it was decidedly elastic-free. I opted just to stick the thing on with a combination of spirit gum and double-sided tape.

Of course, the way it always works when you have a good idea, all the other elements just fell into place. I borrowed a purple corset from my friend Kate. I already had dance shorts, as well as a purple maxi dress with a halter tie, which is all you need for a killer cape. I spent a whole $1.50 on purple stretch gloves at Target. I already had purple star tights and ankle boots, because...well, I don't really like to buy boring clothes.

I'd love to do this for a show. It's ridiculously fun. And can you imagine being involved with a show that needed this sort of thing?

ZOMBIES AHEAD

2009-06-07T16:50:00.002-05:00

Dear Chicago:

Your weather in recent memory has been dismal. Your audition notices have been, almost without exception, dismayingly boring. Your administration is hopelessly corrupt. Streets & Sanitation has torn up my most convenient bike route for the second summer in a row, while leaving several other butt-jarringly cratered streets unrepaired. Unchecked giant squirrels have taken over my balcony garden, and I do not expect to see leaf one of my spinach crop.

But the construction sign greeting the eastbound traffic on Montrose this afternoon--which reads BEWARE: ZOMBIES AHEAD--makes everything okay.

Yours,
Elizabeth

Dear Person Who Made That Sign Happen:

You are my new hero.

That sign is proof that big, gloriously goofy things occasionally happen. Occasionally manage to dodge through the defenses of a system devoted to humorless order and make people laugh out loud on cloudy Sunday afternoons. It is pure clown. It is pure hope. I love it. Thank you.

Yours,
Elizabeth

R.I.P. Will Schutz

2009-05-27T21:58:00.002-05:00

Will Schutz, a beloved fixture of Chicago's storefront theater scene, passed away on Monday. Kris Vire offers a lovely tribute in TimeOut.

This brings the tally to four very talented performers I've known who have died far before their time in the past two years. At least two of them were either uninsured or underinsured.

It will not come as a surprise to anyone who knows me that I don't particularly think the insurance system works. To put it bluntly (since history will not be kind to them either), in the eternal human war on suffering, most health insurance companies are profiteers.

Jesus. Moments like this make a girl need to do something. Death makes me resent every minute I spend in line, or negotiating contracts for day work, or answering calls from telemarketers. I am, at this point, massively impatient. It feels as though it's time to expect more from myself.

Thoughts on the performer as athlete

2009-05-24T22:52:00.002-05:00

For the past month or so I've been meeting three times a week with some other clowns, developing material and characters and so forth. Like any clown process it's been sometimes painful, sometimes exhilarating. I've got a new high-status clown, Paillette, and some interesting possibilities for solo and duet scenes.

Most of us have trained with 500 Clown at some point in the past, and early in the process we brought in Paul for a two-day workshop. At one point he mentioned his belief that a stage performer ought to be an athlete. I agree--and feel as though I have instinctively agreed for a while--but the discussion crystallized several ideas that I've been mulling over for a while.

First, there's just a question of physical necessity. Clown is gruelling. Most theater, if it's good, is exhausting. If you want to do it for any length of time, you have to make sure your body and voice are up to the task. (And voice, more than many people realize, is a matter of body. I remember reading an interview with one of the great Wagnerian sopranos. She mentioned that she'd just started going to a massage therapist who also treated a number of NFL players. On the first visit, the therapist said, "You know, you have back muscles like a linebacker.")

There's also a question of presence. People who are comfortable with their bodies are compelling to watch. I once saw a modern dancer, in his first speaking part, wipe the stage with a cast of more experienced actors. He was used to moving in a way they weren't, and everything that his body did was genuine and natural. That's an aspect of performance that trips up even luminaries like Gielgud (who was famously described as acting with a ribbon tied around his knees).

But beyond the argument of practicality, there's the quality that usually gets the name of "integration." It's a handy term but, I think, a fairly anemic one for one of the performer's most potent tools.

An acting teacher I had years ago used to talk about the quality of danger that a good actor brings onto the stage. It's not a question of menace but of unpredictability, of risk, of life that might burst free at any moment, passions that might turn violent. Of course those impulses exist in all of us on an emotional level; but in the physical actor, there's always a sense that the emotional impulses can immediately become action. They are no sooner felt than lived, without the intervention of conscience or intellect or social duty. Thence the danger.

We discussed this in a different guise, in the Philosophy of Performance class at the Accademia. We read "A Hunger Artist," which of course ends with the popular spectacle of the caged panther, whose appetites and actions are entirely one. We read this in the context of our discussion of Plato and the Platonic mistrust of the body (which evolved into medieval Christian mistrust of the body, which evolved into all sorts of unfortunate tendencies still with us today). Plato heartily disapproved of comedy and the physical effects of laughter, and I'm sure he would have considered clowns and physical performers as base as could be. Anyway, the point is, in a society that still doesn't quite trust the body (or treats it as something separate, an object to be altered or subjugated), the physical performer is an anomale. The difference helps create the necessary whiff of danger--a certain outsider status.

This is a lot of words for something that is easily illustrated with a few gestures. I typically avoid describing clown processes, because that puts me in too analytical a frame of mind; it's often antithetical to the actual work. But I may be at the point in my clown work where, to refine what I'm doing, I have to start describing it consciously. Well, so be it.

Orpheus

2009-04-06T23:36:00.003-05:00

I've started rehearsing a workshop with Filament Theatre--a clown treatment of the Orpheus myth. The idea is that Orpheus and Eurydice are clowns, and every other force in their world (the snake, Hades, the Bacchae) is played by a trio of bouffons. I really, really like this idea, and not just because I get to play Orpheus. Omen--the director--is an alumnus of the Accademia dell'Arte, so we've trained with many of the same people, and as we rehearse I'm finding the direct, practical lines between our classwork and production.

In unrelated news, I don't usually use this blog to plug specific projects, but this one is a bit different. My song "Half" is in the running to be on the soundtrack for a documentary about the Cubs. Which is really exciting. It's open to audience voting until April 17, so if you're looking for ways to kill a little extra time at work, please visit the movie site and vote for me.

Miscellany

2009-01-12T21:13:00.003-06:00

Two readings this weekend--The Nose with Piven and Rhinoceros with Signal Ensemble--confirm that, yes, I'm back in Chicago theater, and yes, I'm enjoying it, and yes, certain things have changed in the way I approach the work. In The Nose there's a doctor character whom I recognized instantly for a Dottore--and that makes sense, since Gogol did a lot of writing in Italy (and said he had to come to Rome to see Russia properly). And in Rhinoceros I spent a lot of time thinking about masks, how you'd create them, how you'd perform with them.

The absurdity of The Nose is very much of a piece with Rhinoceros, despite the century or so that separates their creation. Gogol and Ionesco both managed to tap into a certain motherlode of absurdity that transcends eras--certainly one that goes beyond any specific movement of absurdism. Certain writers can do that. I'd also place Molière, Plautus, Kafka, and Cervantes in the group. There are others--we can all get to that frame of mind, which is part of why it's such effective art--but getting there as an artist is damn hard. I suppose that's part of why I went to Italy.

This weekend I also learned that a really splendid Chicago actor I know has just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And he doesn't have health insurance. And because of that he had to leave the hospital.

I don't care how much lip service we pay to the importance of the arts; this is a damn shoddy way to treat our artists.

The Chicago theater community is rallying with all sorts of benefits and things--carpools to give him rides to chemo, for example--that make me proud and happy to be an actor here. But as a citizen, I'm embarrassed that these measures are necessary. As my friend Josh put it, American taxpayers now own the largest insurer in the world, and we still can't manage to offer health care to everyone. There has to be a better way.

Happy New Year

2008-12-31T14:23:00.002-06:00

2008 has been the kind of year that defies synopsis. There was the whole long wretched winter, the loss of far too many beloved people, the layoff, the car. But there was also clowning, working with Strange Tree, going to New York with Joe, starting a couple of really exciting writing projects, and of course studying in Italy.

I haven't yet made any resolutions for 2009, because it feels as though as soon as I came back from Italy I dove into something quite like the life I want to have. I've been pursuing performance and writing opportunities with a vigor (and, to my own surprise, an enjoyment) unlike anything I've had before. It feels strangely good. Really good. Strong.

To some extent, I guess, this is just the confidence born of experience. I've been out in the world doing this stuff for about ten years, now, and apparently that's the magic amount of time. And it's hard not to emerge from a program like the ADA without some concrete knowledge of your own abilities.

Some of this confidence, though, comes from the really astonishing and wonderful support of my friends and family. This was a big, risky year for me, involving several giant leaps of faith. It would have been so much harder, if not impossible, without all the little messages of support, the hugs, even the comments on this blog--to say nothing of the car trips, the visits, the mail collection, subletting the apartment, watering the plants, saving copies of the November 5 Chicago newspapers.

For 2009, I wish you all this kind of sustaining love, support, courage, and passion. And I hope you use it to challenge yourself in some crazy, ridiculous, wonderful way.

R.I.P. Harold Pinter

2008-12-26T10:50:00.002-06:00

Theater lost a giant yesterday, one of its definitive voices. In tribute, here's his 2005 Nobel lecture.

It's now incumbent on each of us to speak up, speak out, speak the truth, and speak it in our own impossible voices.

Ciao bella

2008-12-21T14:11:00.002-06:00

I landed in Chicago Thursday night, after a clown journey that eventually involved 19 hours of travel, one taxi, a train, three buses, three planes, and a hired car. Chicago was its pretty, sparkly winter self. Since then, of course, the weather has turned awful, has plunged into the sort of cold that makes you question every event in the series of decisions that brought you here. I've promptly developed a head cold, and the impending fact of Christmas seems entirely unreal.

Some farewell views of Arezzo and the villa:

The Christmas lights on the Corso, and our constant companion, the Duomo, settling into shadow on my last evening.

From an upstairs window, here's a view of our courtyard, and the Teatrino, the studio where the theater students spent long hours.

And, also from upstairs, some views of the land around us. In the first shot, the lean-to roof at the bottom left is the area where we ate when the weather was warm enough.

I could have chosen to stay there, and I didn't. I guess that merits an explanation. It's not as simple as the one given by an Aretino student I talked to one day at the bus stop. "I hate Arezzo!" he said, in plaintive English. "There aren't any funs." By this he meant nightclubs, concerts, that sort of thing--and it's true that Arezzo is fairly small, about the same size as Las Cruces, and after a mere three months we students routinely encountered acquaintances on the street. But it's also beautiful, and the proximity of city to farm is something special. And the Accademia is full of people I adore and respect.

No, it's just time to be back here, to do the work that is before me, to brave the cold and use everything I've learned and be a full-time writer and actor and musician. Had I stayed, I'd be an administrator, surrounded by art and learning but not really participating, without even the mitigating possibility of nighttime rehearsals and shows. That was what it came down to: A desk job in paradise is still a desk job.

So I'm here, in this great chilly studio of a city. It'll be very interesting to see what happens next.

Lexicon of the Accademia

2008-12-14T05:00:00.005-06:00

Most of the students have just left for the Florence airport. I'm here for a few more days to clean and inventory. It feels impossibly lonely without the whole ensemble. I realize too that we have developed our own special language, that only 34 people on the planet speak it, that my friends in Chicago will probably look at me oddly if I greet them with 'giorno, and that Ciao bella! will come off as an affectation rather than a sincere compliment.

A sampling of this language, dying even now:

Dov'è...? Where is...?
The first Italian words many of us mastered. Used in a number of creole questions: "Dov'è the hell is my roommate?" (in Venice), "Dov'è my sword?" (in a commedia scene with a Capitano). Also misused with remarkable versatility: "Hey, I have to go dov'è the bagno."

Ma... But...
Used especially to separate and emphasize two halves of a difficult choice, or two mutually exclusive options: "My recital is tomorrow night, MA I have to stay up tonight studying for music history. And I've just had a liter of vino."

Pregs, short for Prego You're welcome.
Also, depending on context, can mean any number of the following: Hello; don't mention it; what sort of coffee would you like; of course you should have some more wine; you go first; I am holding the door for you; it doesn't matter that you have trodden on my foot; you butcher my language, American girl, and your clothing is remarkably unflattering compared to what an Italian tailor could do, but I will maintain civility.

Ragazzis. Teenagers, especially in groups, especially smoking, or doing what they are not supposed to be doing, or not doing what they are supposed to be doing.
The real plural is ragazzi, but Ryan started using ragazzis and it just stuck. This was how the music director of The Persians referred to the liceo students with whom we were collaborating.

San Fab San Fabbiano, the winery up the road, or its red wine, which one purchases by the liter from a gas-pump-style dispenser.

The Salad The Sala Danza, or dance room, one of our movement studios. A.k.a. (of course) the Tony Danza.

Va bene. It's all good.
Notable especially for the permutations among American students: Va bens; Va bensies; Va benzo, Lorenzo (the last of which Joe invented as a parody of the others; it's even better if you imagine the look of horror on the face of the Italian man backing away from your high-five). Students also coined no bene to indicate the opposite, "Not good" or "That's awful," but it is such a departure from true Italian as to horrify even some of the American students.

Ciao. Hello, hi.
Also "goodbye." In this latter usage, when all the other students are hauling their luggage out of the villa, it becomes the hardest word in the world to say.

Paghanini

2008-12-11T16:27:00.004-06:00

I have a new clown. His/her name is Paghanini--one of those ambiguous-gender clowns. Not at all bright. Variously described as a hound and a Neanderthal when angry, which happens often and suddenly. But also really joyous when dancing. Paghanini's dance is a sort of stiff-armed popping and flapping; Allie called it a bouncy penguin dance. Paghanini is much more impatient than my other clowns. That's an interesting feeling to work with; though it's hard to say, given the brevity of the vignettes we're working on, I think it means in a longer scene Paghanini would make more things happen. So he/she may eventually be higher-status than other clowns I've had. Too much of a spaz to be the #1 (or, as Eli calls it, an In Clown), but conceivably a #2 in a trio.

We're working in nose and whiteface. No talking in nose. My clowns have always been fairly quiet (or limited to tiny, tiny vocabularies, like okay and please and that's it), but the discipline of total silence is really instructive. There is just so much you can do with gesture when it's honest. And I think the absence of language lets us mostly avoid the trap of trying to be clever.

It's been amazing, too, to see the changes whiteface wreaks in my classmates' faces. Rich--who's typically pretty bouncy and cuddly--turns into something scary; the makeup brings out all the sharp points in his face. Ryan, normally animated, becomes an incredibly deadpan neutral clown named Lars. His head is shaved and he never smiles. He drew in his eyebrows exactly parallel to his mouth. You could actually draw an oval with two lines for brows, two dots for eyes, a red dot for the nose, and another line for the mouth, and you'd have a reasonably accurate portrait of Lars. Liza, a Hermia type, becomes a wide-eyed three-year-old who's wandered out of bed and into the grown-ups' cocktail party. Vanessa is about the same size as Liza, but she turns into Margherite, who's stone-faced and humorless, the highest-status clown in the room. She looks like the ballet instructor who doesn't mind telling you that you should probably progress to anorexia, because the bulimia is not doing enough for your thighs.

Other aspects of clown don't change. It's exhilarating work, but outside the classroom you do start running into everyday actions that suddenly seem fraught with comic or tragic import, and you've lowered the barriers that would ordinarily keep you from expressing those feelings fully. Picking up a dishrag thrusts you instantly into the trauma of daily domestic life, for example. It's good that we're all living and working together, because all the theater students are going through the same thing, and we don't have to explain these moments to each other.

The Persians

2008-12-08T06:55:00.004-06:00

We had the performance of The Persians yesterday. The day also included a speed-through, a tech run, and an open dress rehearsal, so that meant we went through it four times; that's a long, exhausting day.

Over the course of the rehearsal process the production seemed to get bigger and bigger and bigger, with more and more musicians and instrumental interludes and spoken interludes in Italian--and ancient Greek--and so forth. I think none of us really knew until yesterday afternoon what the whole thing was going to be like. To our relief, it turned out to be be beautiful.

Playing Atossa turned out to be sort of a combination of choreography and classical text and and something resembling Butoh--heightened, stylized, not always comfortable. The nearest experience I've had is probably Prospero in the circus Tempest. But even that was not like this.

There's a long sequence--longer in this production because of a Shostakovich string quintet--in which Atossa mourns silently at Darius's tomb while the chorus is summoning the king's ghost. There is really nothing for it but to sit there and grieve. I've lost several people I loved in the past couple of years, and I mourned for them all on stage. Kevin said that at one point he was sure the mask was crying. If it's the point I think he was talking about, then there were a few tears under the mask as well. I'm really happy to have achieved, however briefly, something I admired so much in the Flöz show. I'm also glad to have grieved, and to have put those emotions into the service of something beautiful. One doesn't always get to.

I don't, in point of fact, know how anyone deals with grief without some sort of artistic outlet. But maybe that's part of why we make art--to help others come to terms with the senseless fact of their own death, and the eventual disappearance of everything and everyone they love.

It's getting cold here now, although Tuscany tends to the foggy and wet rather than the leaden cold I associate with Chicago at this time of year.

This is our last week of classes. It doesn't seem possible. Without a constant barrage of Santa Claus kitsch, Christmas still feels remote. Italy has Babbo Natale, but it's just not the sort of country that goes in for giant inflatable lawn ornaments. It's funny what you wind up being homesick for.

This afternoon, we started the clown intensive. Eli Simon, from the U.C. Irvine theater program, is teaching. There are a few slight differences from what I've done before, but we're starting with entrance work and status and all those good things, and so far I can't say much beyond YES. CLOWN. LIKE.

Vatican III: This Time It's Personal

2008-12-06T06:31:00.003-06:00

A series of clown events attended my efforts to visit the Vatican Museum--from booking the pensione room for the first trip before learning that the museum would be closed for All Saints Day, to oversleeping and missing several trains for the second trip, and then watching a train enter and leave the station while I was trying to get the ticket machine to take my card. So yesterday was my last chance, and dammit, I was not going to miss it. I hauled myself out of bed early, and stumbled through Arezzo in the predawn rain.

In Rome I promptly got lost, despite having walked to the Vatican before. I was afraid that this would be the crowning clown moment: that I'd arrive too late to get in. Fortunately Rome was also pretty dreary and wet, and though there was a long line of tourists with umbrellas outside St. Peter's, none of them seemed all that interested in the art around the corner. So I got in with no wait--no wait! at the Vatican Museum!--and went wandering through halls that were so empty I kept expecting someone to tell me the place was closed.

I hit the Pinacoteca first. I sneezed very loudly in a medieval gallery, and thereby struck up a conversation with a friendly guard (does the "bless you" count extra at the Vatican Museum, do you think?). He showed me the Forli angels, and the cracked plaster on one face that had always reminded him of cigarette smoke. It was true--among all these lute-playing cherubs was one who clearly had a future in jazz. This is apparently a you-had-to-be-there moment; that's the one angel whose image I can't find on line. (It tells you everything you need to know about my personal theology that I will take photos in a cathedral but not in an art museum.)

The Guido Reni paintings were among my favorites, not least because I'm not as familiar with Reni as with other artists. His depiction of a wild-haired St. Matthew receiving the gospel as divine dictation is lovely.

Of course, anyone who's ever written knows that the inclusion of the angel is an act of supreme mercy on Reni's part. Replace the angel with a coffee mug and the painting becoes far more realistic. But Matthew's face is just perfect; and evidently I'm not the first to realize it, because the same image adorns a bunch of notebooks in the gift shop.

Quite a lot of tourists have no qualms about taking snapshots, even with flash, in an art gallery. The Vatican Museum seems fairly resigned to this; I suppose it's more of an issue for a typical not-for-profit institution that derives much of its income from reproductions of the art. But it was still jarring, once I encountered the tourists, to see them pose in front of, say, Raphael's Transfiguration, with a hip thrust out and lips pursed into a campy kiss. I think the snapshot impulse is something akin to the graffiti impulse, the desire to say, Look, I did this, I saw this, I was here. (I could get into the longer discussion of how we as a society tend to view the photographic media as conferring legitimacy and importance upon people, but I should probably save it for the actual philosophy paper I have to write today.)

I went on through the halls of maps and tapestries. There's also probably a lot more to be written about Maria de Rivera, the weaver who executed all those giant tapestries from the life of Urban. Hers was one of the few female names I saw in the course of the day, with, of course, the exception of the other Maria. (In one of the Baroque galleries there's even a painting by Ortensio Gentilleschi, but none by his rather more talented daughter.)

Of course the whole thing ends with the Sistine Chapel. This was where all the tourists were, it turned out. Ceding to the inevitable, the museum now plays a booming recording requesting silence in six different languages. It doesn't work. It's splendidly ironic, of course, but between the irony and the throngs of people the chapel has lost something of its capacity for spiritual might.

As at St. Peter's, what struck me more than anything else was the sheer dogged ability of Michelangelo. I think he might have sensed something of this too, from his self-portrait as the flayed, empty skin in the Last Judgment; amid all that grand scope is one exhausted man. The image reminds me of Marcello's proverb, which he'd repeat whenever one of us finished a scene gasping and sweaty: "The mask begins to live when the actor begins to die." Maybe we all, ultimately, sacrifice ourselves in order to create; maybe that's the only way to make something bigger than ourselves. Michelangelo, more than most of us, knew that this wasn't poetic exaltation but simple workaday fact. I think if you asked him he'd acknowledge it with a nod and a grunt and then go back to painting. That's what the self-portrait hisses to the attuned ear: This is what one person can achieve. Get to work.

Rome, again

2008-12-01T06:01:00.004-06:00

On Saturday I went to Rome to see the National Gallery of Modern Art and the Galleria Borghese. Both are in the Villa Borghese, a large park complete with zoo and ponds and trails and so on.

In some aspects it reminded me very much of Central Park. But every so often I'd remember that this all used to be the private compound of the Borgias, and think, Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta.

I was delighted to discover that the park contained numerous statues of post-Borgia literary figures--notably Victor Hugo and Nikolai Gogol. The inscription on the base of the Gogol statue was in both Italian and Russian, which seemed entirely appropriate.

The National Gallery of Modern Art is fantastic. I think I needed a bit of a palate-cleanser after the amount of medieval and Renaissance art I've seen lately. The twentieth-century rooms felt bracing and clean. (I had much the same sensation at the Venice Guggenheim in October.) At the same time I was thinking of our discussion in philosophy class of the economic forces that shape the arts today; Scott pointed out that, for example, the C.I.A. helped popularize abstract expressionism, because they wanted to divert attention from art with more explicitly political content. I was conscious of wondering which artists were trying to shake me from my bourgeois complacency, and which might have been funded by people who would really prefer that I stay complacent, and so on. But there's a point at which all those questions become inimical to the whole point of art, which is to experience it with every sense and let the mind catch up later. When I hit that point was when I really started having fun.

I didn't know, going in, that the gallery had Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (the notorious urinal). But it did, along with a whole host of other read-made Duchamp compositions (if "compositions" is the right word for them). What's funny is that when I saw it I felt a little shiver of recognition, the same one I feel when I round the corner and see a Michelangelo (or whatever) that I know. I knew instantly this was the piece to mention when people asked me about the trip. This mass-produced thing, the defiantly anti-Aura piece of art, most definitely has its own Aura now. I hope Duchamp would be amused by that.

There were several Italian artists I'd never heard of--it's wonderful, of course, to stand in front of an acknowledged masterwork, but in some ways it's even better when a gallery introduces you to a painting or a painter you don't know at all. (This happened at the Uffizi with the fantastic Feast with Lute Player. That link doesn't really do it justice; when you stand before the painting in person you have the sense that you're at the pub with all these people, who are your best friends.) I loved Carlo Levi's portrait of the poet Umberto Saba, which seemed to glow; it was mostly the choice of palette and the way the light hit the oil paint, but it suggested wonderful things about the vitality of the subject. The rhythm of Giacomo Balla's Espansione dinamica + velocità made me wonder why he isn't better known among the cubists. Among the works of the later twentieth century I especially liked Alberto Burri's giant experiments with different materials and surfaces--great knots of canvas and paint, blocks of wood, cracked slabs of pigment, and so on.

The piece that hit with the most immediacy, though, was Ivan Mestrovich's marble statue Vecchia. It's an old woman, nude. It's the antithesis of the heroic nude. She is dessicated, slumping; the line of her lips shows her nearness to death. But the heartbreaking thing about it is her utter defeat. There's no humor left in her, no strength left in the back or the hips or the arms. She has given up. If, after an absence of years, you met a friend and found her looking like this, you would weep. I very nearly wept for the marble stranger.

Then on to the Galleria Borghese, one of those places that helps you understand why Italy has as many laws at it does. Rules are very important at the Galleria Borghese. You can't get in without a reservation; the reservations are only at odd-numbered hours; you can't get in before your reserved time slot; you can't stay past it; you have to check your bags (but not your coat); if you somehow make it past a guard with your backpack and an upstairs docent sees you, you will be sent downstairs to check the backpack before you continue looking at art; and God help you if you forgot to turn off your cell phone.

But for all that it has Bernini's David. I've lost count of the number of Davids I've seen on this trip. Michelangelo's, nerving himself (I agree with several critics that he has not yet thrown the fatal stone); Donatello's, boyish and balletic, his innocence seemingly undamaged by the sight of the giant's severed head; and any number of others, in paint, fresco, bronze, marble, and glass. The stance of Bernini's David is a big deal, I know--the torsion and action of the muscles, the slenderness of the taut sling--but for my money the exciting part is the face, the lips compressed with effort, the eyes being willed not to blink. I've seen this face. I've made this face. He is so alive.

Masks, day four

2008-11-27T11:56:00.003-06:00

New faces greeted us in the studio this afternoon--the work of the students from the morning session.

There seems to be a revelation at every stage of mask construction. Today's was one of the most exciting: peeling the actual latex mask out of the plaster negative.

People were visibly delighted to meet their masks at last. Ryan let out a laugh like a new parent. Before long the studio was full of new characters--a Capitano and a Magnifico...

...and a Pantalone, a Pulcinella, and another Capitano.

We used scissors and rotor tools to trim off the excess latex and fiberglass. The eye sockets are really difficult. I'm not sure what sort of tool might make them easier. Possibly a really sharp X-acto, in combination with a face-shaped cutting mat. Not that face-shaped cutting mats actually exist, as far as I am aware.

The last step was priming the masks with some sort of lacquer, the genuine gommalacca made by dissolving beetle dung in alcohol. (Lino explained all that in Italian, complete with a diagram of the pooping beetle. I love commedia.) Tomorrow we paint. The first masks we'll be painting to look like leather; the second ones we can paint as we wish. On half an Arlecchino mask, Lino demonstrated using acrylics to accentuate the contours.

The other half of the mask is still brown. Beetle poop will do that.

Expat Thanksgiving

2008-11-27T06:35:00.002-06:00

Everyone at the villa is a bit homesick today. Some people say it outright. For others it's not as obvious, but I get the sense that more people are gathering in common areas, needing some sort of family. There's going to be a turkey dinner tonight, but we have classes the same as any other day, and our European faculty seem quietly bemused about the whole concept of Thanksgiving. Lunchtime conversation turned to the foods we missed--pumpkin pie, barbecue, green chile--and then to more general lacks such as being able to cook in a kitchen, watching the football broadcast, taking a break from eating to toss around a football with your dad--all these unremarkable moments that somehow turn out to be rituals.

But it seems much more in the spirit of the day to turn my attention from what I don't have to what I do. I'm in Italy, living out an artist's dream of education and exploration, and I'm here because of the emotional and practical support of several wonderful people who I am lucky to have in my life. I'll be coming home to a different president-elect, and--even more important--the knowledge that I am not at all alone in wanting to work for social change. I am surrounded by beauty, by people who stimulate my mind and my creativity and my compassion and my funny bone, and that's pretty amazing. Thanks, everyone.

Pulling faces

2008-11-26T16:51:00.002-06:00

Under the watchful eyes of former students, we proceeded with making our actual masks--pulling them from the molds, to use the studio argot.

First we dug away the slabs of clay forming the frame, and then prised the plaster from the clay positive. I was a little sad to realize that this meant the end of the clay positive. Few of them survived the process. On detailed features like my mask's eyebrows, the clay tended to lodge in the tiny hollows between the ribs of plaster, which meant a fair amount of excavation with wooden tools, wire tools, and wet and dry brushes--like some combination of an archeologist and a dentist.

Once the plaster negative was clean, we coated the inside with liquid latex. We started by turning the nose into a sort of reservoir, and then swirling the latex around the negative. (I couldn't do that and take pictures at the same time, so this is an image of Zach's Magnifico negative.)

With a brush, we added more latex, and spread it around more. Then we added a thin layer of fiberglass and tamped it into place with more latex. Maybe this part of the process comes naturally to some people. Not to me. The bristles of the brush and the bristles of fiberglass kept getting tangled and messy, and I kept having to stop and peel boogers of dried latex off my fingers so that I wouldn't stick to things. But eventually I dried the latex with a hairdryer, and added another layer of latex and fiberglass and got it dry too.

Then it was time to be good artists and take care of our medium. So that it could be reused, all the clay from the positives had to be washed--torn into small chunks, immersed, and kneaded until the bits of plaster floated free. This is long, repetitive work, but there's something to be said for chatting with three friends with your hands together in a tub of mud. Anything that makes you laugh until you cry can't be all bad.

Siena, times two

2008-11-26T06:50:00.008-06:00

I never posted the photos from my first day trip to Siena (back in October), so I'm combining images from that trip and the one this past Saturday.

The zebra-striped Duomo is one of my favorites in Italy so far.

The interior shifts between solemnity and a sort of brilliant goofiness, as if people just kept adding pretty things without knowing when to stop.

This is probably what a cathedral would look like if Strange Tree Group decorated it.

Of course, there are marvelous pieces of art...

...and vertiginous views of the city from the top of the arcade above the Duomo museum, on the wall that would have been part of the Duomo's nave if the Black Plague hadn't wiped out half the city and the cathedral-building workforce.

There's also food. The ceiling of this shop is thick with wild boar sausages, hocks of prosciutto, strings of garlic, and everything else you could want. Behind the counter are ten different kinds of pecorino. The air is redolent with cinnamon from the bakery on the premises. The owner--of course--wears a tall white paper hat and has a wide, curling moustache and gives you slices of salami his sister has made.

The other wonderful thing I tried--and it was probably made exponentially more wonderful by the freezing weather--was a traditional soup called acqua cotta. It's vegetable soup (broccoli, carrots, tomatoes, onions, cabbage, celery, and something--probably peperoncini--with a kick) that has been put in the broiler for a bit, and is then served over grilled bread, all topped with a poached egg. This, too, I will be making in the depths of the Chicago cold.

Day two of the mask intensive

2008-11-25T14:20:00.002-06:00

It seems somewhat anticlimactic to say that day two began with much of what we did on day one: refining the clay features, checking for symmetry, getting the face the way you want it. My Dottore began to feel very much like me. In fact, twice I sprayed water on the cheeks to smooth out the clay, and almost instantly I felt as though I were close to tears. (I chalked it up to the plaster dust in the air, but no mistake, there's something spooky about the kinship between actor and mask.)

Once the faces were in good shape, we constructed frames for them out of flat slabs of clay. Rather than simply framing the face positives, the frames went around the edges of the final mask (more or less from the upper lip to the earlobe at the bottom, and a couple of centimeters above the hairline at the top). So suddenly our masks all looked like bib-wearing conquistadores--with the exception of Zach's Magnifico, whose frame and props looked like flowing hair and so turned him into a distant kinsman of Michelangelo's Moses.

The frames had a purpose, which was to contain drips of plaster. We mixed up great tubs of it--you stir it with your fingers, an experience that rivals kneading bread for sheer pleasure--and then drizzled it over the faces, with the same gestures I remember using to make mud-drip sand castles as a child. Once the face is covered and you've carefully blown on all the bubbles until they pop, you dip strips of fabric--coarse burlap in this case--into the plaster. Then you put a layer of plaster-coated fabric over the whole face.

By then, the plaster was thickening, so we had to hurry through the best part: scooping up fistfuls of plaster and splatting them over the fabric. (It's fun because, well, you're scooping up big messy fistfuls of plaster, but also because plaster gets warm as it dries, probably because of some oxidation process I should remember from chemistry.) Each mask turned into a featureless mound of white plaster; the long-nosed Capitano masks were slightly distinguished by a peak in the middle of the mound. We smoothed out the mounds with a spatula. Zach pointed out that they looked like nothing so much as a window display of gelato. All vanilla.

Tomorrow the plaster will have hardened into a negative, which will be the basis for the latex mask itself. I hope that will yield some good photos--the closeup of the featureless white lump didn't quite make for a riveting image.

Masks and snow

2008-11-24T16:29:00.002-06:00

The villa has spent most of the day in a dark, cold rain only one step removed from sleet. There's snow in the hills nearby. The radiators are doing their best, but heat is state-rationed in Italy, so everyone's hunkering down in multiple layers of sweats and scarves.

Today we started our mask-making intensive with Lino. Each of us has chosen one commedia mask to make; from this mold we'll each pull one copy for future students of the Accademia and one for ourselves.

Everyone starts by smearing clay on a plaster or cement positive. The Accademia has a number of cement positives in varying sizes and shapes, and most students are working with positives that approximate their own faces. Zach and I, since we had molds taken for The Persians, are working with those positives. It's a disconcerting, alienating experience to sculpt upon your own features. If the masks weren't grotesques, I think I'd be tempted to correct certain aspects of my face.

It's been years since I've worked in an art studio, and I didn't realize how much I missed it. The visual and plastic arts have always been able to take me to a place of happy calm akin to a runner's high or the mental state immediately after yogic meditation. Working with clay, in particular, is so immediate and tactile that you can almost bypass your brain and let your eyes and hands do all the work. (Lino says, in fact, that the eyes are the more important factor: being able to observe matters more than being able to work with your hands.) It's especially gratifying to sculpt after spending so much time in the past three months looking at and thinking about the great sculptures of the Renaissance.

Once the positives were coated evenly with clay, we began to build up the characters' features. You start with the nose and work out. The nose is obviously the salient point of most commedia characters. Some historians draw correspondences between nose size and stupidity, with the long-nosed Capitano as the biggest idiot on stage. The nose is also usually where the character's traditional resemblance to a particular animal becomes clear (though not always, as in the infamous case of the Arlecchino mask with the forcibly enlarged cat eyes). And on a purely practical level, it's the most exaggerated feature on almost every mask, so you have to use it as the basis for the rest of the proportions.

I'm working on a Dottore mask, since that's the character I tend to play best.

Lino commented that almost every first mask tends to look somewhat like its creator. He singled my mask out as an example. And everyone else agreed: apparently I make this face all the time as the Dottore.

Tomorrow we'll refine the clay molds. Then they'll become the basis for negative molds, which we'll use to create the actual latex masks. I think I'd be happy to keep working in clay forever.

Florence in the cold

2008-11-23T15:20:00.006-06:00

Apparently winter comes even to Italy. This weekend garlands of Christmas lights and pine boughs appeared in the streets of Florence. Joe came to visit, and on Friday--bundled up--we set out to meet the Renaissance. The first stop was the Duomo, whose exterior reminds me of an elaborate sugar confection.

I was expecting a similarly ornate interior, but it's actually pretty spare inside. Apparently it was always somewhat restrained, and then it was cleaned out because of the flood of 1966. There's no such restraint, however, in the Vasari frescoes in the dome, which depict the Last Judgment. Several panels feature sinners either being flayed or peeling off their own skins.

At the top of the cupola--after a series of steep, twisty, low-ceilinged staircases that are pure nightmare fodder--is a lovely view of the city.

There's also an incredible amount of graffiti. Even though Italian gave us the word graffiti, I've been surprised at how much of it I see here, especially on monuments. The statue in the Arezzo Prato, for example, which shows (I think) native son Petrarch receiving his laurel wreath, is spray-painted with legends such as "Emo Lesbos." But I digress.

We went to the Science Museum, which we'd both been looking forward to. As it turned out, two of the three floors were under construction and therefore off limits. But we did see Galileo's middle finger. Apparently one need not be a saint to ignite obsessive interest in the preservation of one's body parts, or else someone wanted to prevent his posthumously flipping the bird to the Church. We also saw a fantastic exhibit on the development of the Galilean and Newtonian telescopes.

From there, in the thickening rain, we headed to Santa Croce.

It, too, is currently under construction--what looks like a restoration project for the frescoes behind the altar. Major sections of the interior are hidden behind scaffolds and drapes.

But the side chapels and frescoes--especially those by Giotto--are still wonderful.

Santa Croce also houses the tombs of Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and Galileo. Minus his finger, of course.

Dante would have been entombed here if he hadn't been banished from the city--nothing like carrying a grudge past the grave, although you could argue that Dante himself did a fair amount of that in the Inferno. But there's a memorial statue of him outside.

When we came out, dusk was falling--early, because of the rain--and the whole city seemed chilly.

By night, the Duomo looks much less like candy.

We spent Saturday in Siena--which will have to be a whole separate post. This morning Florence was brilliantly sunny. You can just see the Ponte Vecchio in the background here (the foreground bridge is the Ponte San Trinità).

We crossed the Arno and headed to the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine, which houses the Brancacci Chapel. In this chapel are the Masaccio frescoes that changed everything, that decisively brought human emotion and individuality into Renaissance art. From art history class I remembered the image of Adam and Eve expelled from Eden, but it's another thing altogether to see the actual fresco on the wall, the matter-of-factness of this revolution, off to the side in a silent, almost deserted church. This I suppose is what Walter Benjamin means when he talks about the aura of a work of art, and I have to admit that in this case he seems to be right. Anyway, I long for my art history textbook and notes; I have the sense that all these works have suddenly come to life around me.

On the way back we happened to glance into an open doorway, and so discovered an item that clearly belongs on the list of Best Things Ever: the pasta vending machine.

I wish I could report that we were brave enough to try it.

Masks of Venice

2008-11-18T16:50:00.002-06:00

Here's a catch-up post from a trip last month.

Venice is a strange place. Walking through it I had the same sense I had when I walked through pre-Katrina New Orleans: This city is devoted almost entirely to separating tourists from their money. The feeling isn't as sinister in Venice, but it's certainly there.

The other thing Venice does really well is decorate. Every possible surface is gilt, or embroidered, or inlaid, or all three. My friend Jesse notes that the Bedazzler hit Italy in 1987 and never left, and it's true; it takes some work to find a sweatshirt that doesn't bear some sort of rhinestone-sequin legend such as "Rock Princess." But even by Italian standards, Venice is ornate. I started to wonder if there were some sort of island aesthetic at work--the same way island populations develop pronounced genetic quirks, perhaps they can develop a weakness for masks decoupaged with staff paper and gold paint. I think it's possible. After only a couple of days, even if you previously thought that masks were the height of kitsch, it starts to seem perfectly normal to fork over 60 euros to buy one.

Of course, these aren't theater masks. They're tourist masks, meant to evoke the Carnival of Venice. There are all sorts of old links between carnival rites and theatrical rites, but the bottom line is, theatrical masks reveal character, and these masks conceal; theatrical masks are living masks, and these are dead.

Some of the elaborations, though, were fantastic, and I wished people had turned this creativity to theatrical design rather than tourism.

But I'm certain they make more money from tourism.

As a postscript, just because I'm kind of proud of it, here's a photo from today's studio time.

The book is our philosophy textbook--all the theater students take a seminar in the aesthetics of art and performance--but mostly I'm excited about being able to hold a headstand well enough to pose for a silly photo. Even if my legs are a bit crooked. Certain muscles are stronger than they've ever been.

The Olive Harvest

2008-11-17T07:11:00.003-06:00

Two weeks ago we began harvesting olives from the villa's small grove, with students helping out as they could. Harvesting involves spreading out a tarp or a net over the ground beneath the tree, then raking the olives from the branches. I've seen some people actually use a little hand rake to do it. We just used our hands.

Our olives are relatively small, a mix of green and black. The ones here are a bit wizened; they were overlooked in the harvest.

An uncured olive, right off the tree, is one of the foulest tastes you can ever have in your mouth. It's inescapable and bitter--the word that comes to mind is alkaline, although I have no idea whether that's accurate--and the oil coats your tongue in a way that makes the flavor hang around for hours.

But of course the oil--pressed, with the water removed--is a different story. Today at lunch we had oil made from the olives we helped pick. And it was fantastic. We're in the olive oil capital of the world, of course, but apparently this variety of oil would retail for about $35 a liter in the U.S.

It's not as olive-y or briny as some oils I've tasted. There's a slight bite to the flavor, which is clearly the pleasant counterpart of the raw olives' bitterness. And it's beautiful--almost as green as absinthe.

Sunrise

2008-11-17T01:49:00.003-06:00

I awoke this morning to brilliant pink light on the shutters. I got up and saw this:

It vanished almost as quickly as I could photograph it. But it made me feel as though whatever I decide about next year, the world will go on, and it's going to be all right.

Chocolate and choices

2008-11-15T13:43:00.002-06:00

I've been preoccupied for a couple of days because, unexpectedly, I may have the option of staying here for a few more months. It would mean all sorts of logistical issues to work out, including perhaps giving up my apartment in Chicago, my home for seven years, a place I love and have made my own. And it would essentially mean that I couldn't be in a show until September, which feels like a very long time. But it could also mean I could take a full-head mask intensive with the founder of Familie Flöz. And it would mean more time in Italy. The expat experience is really important for artists (especially, when I think about it, the majority of artists I most admire); I think we tend to forget about it in today's America.

As if to persuade me, Arezzo had a chocolate festival today. There is no doubt in my mind: Italy produces the best hot chocolate in the world. (I feel fairly secure saying that, as the only other real pretenders to the throne are the Swiss, and what are they going to do, attack me? Even if they do, decades of neutrality will have left them unprepared to face a chocolate-fueled actor who's been training in German acrobatics.)

I tried a number of things, including a few varieties of hot chocolate, a coffee-cream croissant, a tiny bittersweet chocolate-peperoncino truffle with a little crunch to it, and an apparently famous Neapolitan tart that I thought was not as good as the croissant. And I saw many others, such as chocolate-hazelnut salami, giant mounds of truffle ganache covered in hazelnuts (by "giant" I mean at least as big around as a hubcap, and probably 10 inches tall), and chocolate liqueur sold with a little bag of shot glasses made from the same stuff as ice cream cones. Which struck me as a very good idea.

Also a good idea: the Nutella crepe. This is part of what makes Italy so good--they take one of the high points of French cuisine and say, Sure, not bad, but you know what we could do with this? Fill it with warm Nutella, fold it in quarters, and sell it on street corners. And it is brilliant.

Later, no closer to a decision, I went for a twilight run in the park (one of the things I will miss no matter when I leave; it's just off the path to the grocery store). The air came alive with bells, as it does here, and on my iPod Snow Patrol started playing "Chocolate": "This could be the very minute I'm aware I'm alive / All these places feel like home."

That's true. They do feel like home--Arezzo and Chicago alike.

Maybe I'll just wake up tomorrow and know.

Cortona: Le Celle

2008-11-15T03:13:00.004-06:00

Last weekend I went back to Cortona, accompanied this time by a map and Rich, a fellow student. We were determined to find Le Celle, the Franciscan monastery several miles from the centro. So, fortified by a cioccolata densa (an Italian hot chocolate, bittersweet and with the consistency of pudding), we set out on our hike.

Fall has settled onto the Tuscan mountains.

At the midpoint of the hike is the Cappella Bentivoglio, a tiny stucco chapel for wayfarers and pilgrims.

Around 3:30 we arrived at Le Celle. It's built into the living rock of the mountainside, something like the cliff dwellings of the Southwest.

This is the part of the day words fail to capture. The monastery is still active, and the stillness of the place is so great I had the sense of being able to hear each individual bird's song in the surrounding forest. We came down a long brick path to a tiny chapel adjacent to the cell where St. Francis lived and meditated. He may have built it himself. If the doorway and bed (a narrow wooden plank set into the wall) are any indication, I'm taller than he was.

One cell next to the chapel is set up as something of a gift shop--with a few ten-cent postcards, icons of St. Francis, books, and tau amulets made of olive wood--but in its Franciscan way it's sort of defiantly anti-tourist and anti-capitalist: it's unstaffed, and it works on the honor system.

We roamed around the grounds and paths, occasionally hearing singing from the church behind the monastery. Here I should let the images take over, in the hopes of conveying the beauty and silence of the place.

The sun was setting over the pine trees and olive terraces when we began the hike back.

We took a different way around the city wall, climbing higher than we had on our way out. More or less at the summit we encountered the cathedral of Santa Margherita, by the light of the rising moon.

Mass was in progress, so we couldn't go in. And it was getting cold. We wound back down through Cortona's steep streets to the Piazza della Republica for another cioccolata densa.

Then, since we still had an hour to kill before catching the bus back to Arezzo, and as actors and true Franciscan pilgrims neither of us had much cash, we tried to find a bar serving free primi piatti. (It's fairly common here to order a beer and then help yourself to bruschetta, small panini, cheese, sausage, or salad.) Rich remembered that the bar in the civic theater building had primi piatti the last time he was in Cortona, so we tried it. The bar appeared to be closed, but we heard a lot of voices upstairs. We went up a level and saw trays of bruschetta and bottles of wine. The voices were still upstairs; it sounded like a gallery opening. We wondered if maybe we could blend in, look at the art for a bit, and have a few bruschette.

And that was where Clown reasserted itself in the day, because we went up another level and the first thing we saw was a mannequin in full Pulcinella garb. The exhibit was about theater design, with costume sketches and scenic designs for numerous Goldoni plays, as well as some Shakespeare and twentieth-century plays--even an Italian-language production of Long Day's Journey Into Night. We came in expecting to crash the party, and it turned out we belonged there.

The bruschette were delicious.

Rehearsing Atossa

2008-11-12T13:53:00.002-06:00

I realize "Rehearsing Atossa" sounds like the name of a really dreadful romantic comedy (starring, maybe, Anne Hathaway and D.B. Sweeney) about two actors who meet in rehearsals of this, the oldest of plays, and can't stand each other at first but gradually learn to see past each other's masks--literally and figuratively! But I can't think of a better title for the post about rehearsing the role of Atossa, so it stays.

I don't have the mask yet; it's still being finished. The person who's finishing it has apprenticed with Familie Flöz; I knew that all along, but now that I've seen how fantastic their masks are the knowledge has become quite a bit more exciting.

I'm impatient. The mask is a giant part of the character, of course, but there are also matters of physical and vocal endurance to be considered; mask work just asks more from your muscles, and there's no way to do it in performance if you haven't been doing it steadily in rehearsals. Specifically, vocal volume has to be a bit stronger, and articulation has to be even more precise, because you're losing most of the tiny unconscious bits of facial motion that might clue an audience into your meaning even if they miss a word. And what might, maskless, consist of darting your eyes sideways becomes, with the mask, a gesture that involves the whole head. So your shoulders and neck work much harder than usual, which in turn can introduce tension into your vocal apparatus if you're not careful.

So for the sake of getting used to all that, I've been rehearsing with a commedia mask of roughly the same proportions as the Atossa mask: Columbina.

She's not at all like the other commedia masks I've worked with (I tend to be a Dottore, but I also played around a bit with the Capitano and Arlecchino). With the exception of the Strega (witch), female masks traditionally aren't grotesque. It was only in the later years of commedia that actresses wore masks at all--for the purely practical reason that if you were performing in the street, you got more attention when you had pretty women on your stage.

This Columbina wasn't molded to my face, of course, and she doesn't fit perfectly. Columbina is also something of a soubrette, so she's not the most accurate match for Atossa. But for a week's rehearsals she'll do. I've used the mask for two rehearsals now, and there's just no comparison between working barefaced and working with the actual physical mask reminding your body and voice of what to do.

Even though we did several weeks of rigorous commedia mask work, this feels different, as though mask technique is finally settling in and becoming something I can use without a constant, nervous awareness of what I'm doing. I suppose that's because, as Simon Callow says, it's only the lessons of true performance that really stick. I feel as though I learned a lot from the Flöz show too. Anyway, it's good to have a production in which to use all these new ideas.

Oh! Theater!

2008-11-11T01:57:00.003-06:00

Last night we had a class excursion to the Familie Flöz show Teatro Delusio. Flöz uses full-head masks and no dialogue; the result is sort of a combination of clown, dance, mime, puppetry, and drama, and it's entirely moving. It's a story of backstage drama at a haunted theater, and (I think) the way disappointed hopes and dreams can haunt a place even more.

From the Flöz site, here are a couple of the show's masks. The one on the left is an unsavory choreographer. The one on the right was one of my favorites--a stagehand, and the low-status clown in the clown-y sequences:

The subtleties the performers achieve with these faces--which, after all, can't move on their own--are incredible. Part of it is good mask construction; the masks catch the light beautifully, and there are times you'd swear a character is shedding a tear or sweating. But most of it is just good performance, actors who allow the mask to inhabit the body fully, using economy and clarity and scale of gesture to present a being that is heartbreakingly alive.

The show is an impressive feat of stagecraft as well, because there are only three performers, who in the course of the evening create a cast of twenty-seven. That demands not just flawless quick changes but also amazingly precise body/mask work.

This is the first show I've seen since leaving Chicago. Of course we're immersed in theater here, we're surrounded by posters of different productions and the classic prints of the commedia characters, and everyone has seen and worked on hundreds of plays and is planning or writing or rehearsing hundreds more--but it's still a breath of pure oxygen to encounter an actual show. Oh, right: that's what we're all doing here.

Much as I love this training, I am impatient now to use it.

Rome: Ruins

2008-11-07T13:45:00.005-06:00

It is perhaps impossible to walk through Italy without thinking about the life cycle of empires. You see the relics of the Etruscans, the pagan Romans, the Christian Romans, the medievals, the Renaissance merchant-aristocrat families, and so on; and as you tour these places you hear the sounds of another empire--American pop music. My tours have, additionally, been accompanied by news of imminent global financial collapse, shocks throughout the empire that is currently dominant.

If there's one thing to learn from Rome, it is that the memorial and the private residence crumble equally--that you can't really choose what future generations find out about you. Maybe it's stated most fittingly by the inscription that accompanies the skeletons in the Capuchins' crypt:

QUELLO CHE VOI SIETE NOI ERAVAMO,
QUELLO CHE NOI SIAMO VOI SARETE.
(What you are we were, what we are you will be.)

Ironically enough, while I was inside the Colosseum, a foot race was taking place around its perimeter. I was surprised to learn that part of its considerable surface damage was due to later generations, who treated the building as a marble quarry and apparently thought nothing of carting off pieces of it. We don't have control over that sort of thing either, I guess.

Then, Constantine's Arch, the ruins of the Forum, the Palatine Hill, the Capitoline Hill, the temple of the Vestal Virgins, the temple of Apollo, and so forth. It can be difficult here to know what you're looking at; in some cases I couldn't tell then; in some cases I've forgotten.

I do know this was once the Temple of Saturn.

And this was Augustus's house (14 BR, COL VW, MUST SEE!).

In the evening, when I came back for the nighttime view of the Campidoglio, the arch of Septimus Severus was just visible against the darkness, with the broken columns and walls behind it like ghosts.

Rome: Churches

2008-11-05T16:46:00.006-06:00

Any day in which you wake up to the words "President Obama," do two hours of voice work, do an hour of yoga and another hour of acrobatics, pick olives in the late afternoon sun, and then go for a long run through the back roads of Tuscan wine country, you have to start wondering if you're leading a charmed life.

When you started off the week in Rome, you have to conclude, yes, it's definitely charmed.

In the continuing series of installments, here are a few pictures from the churches and cathedrals I visited.

Santa Maria Maggiore was just a minute or two from my B&B. Unfortunately it wasn't open for visits.

Next on the tour was San Pietro in Vincoli, on an out-of-the-way piazza just a block or two from the Colosseum.

It's a pretty quiet, unassuming place--for a Roman church--and I think most people just go there for Michelangelo's Moses, which is to the right of the altar.

But it also has several graves and memorials adorned with what look suspiciously like real skeletons.

I thought this was really spooky, until I saw the crypt of the Capuchin monks, which is decorated with over 4,000 skeletons lovingly taken apart and turned into, say, rosettes of vertebrae, or arches of shoulder blades, or domino-rows of pelvises. Now this is just somewhat spooky.

Later, having found the Pantheon closed, I stepped into Sant'Andrea delle Valle. It was twilight, and most tourists were elsewhere.

And finally, the next day, St. Peter's, where the late-morning sun fell onto the smoke from the censers:

It's difficult to appreciate the scale of St. Peter's from a photo, but take a look at how it dwarfs the people attending mass:

But oddly enough, for me the dominant impression was not so much the glory of God as the glory of man. The amassed wealth is clearly displayed for human eyes, not divine ones. The genius of Michelangelo shines through--you can almost sense him pacing, solving problems of proportion and weight and balance. He borrowed the dome's proportions from the Pantheon's dome, which seems almost subversive--a pagan design crowning one of the high seats of Christianity.

The whole thing is a stunning example of what people can achieve. It is, finally, quite a humanist cathedral.

Rome: The Pantheon

2008-11-03T11:24:00.003-06:00

Irony of ironies, the Pantheon was actually closed on All Saints' Day. This may be the cry of the wounded Unitarian, but even if you are the Catholic Church, and even if you are in Rome, and even if you have converted an ancient pagan building into a cathedral, I still call it foul play to close the temple of all gods for the holiday of one religion. Especially when that holiday is not on the official list of closures posted on the door.

However, on Sunday morning, the Pantheon was open, there was no line, and my wrath was somewhat appeased.

Nothing prepares you for the sudden presence of the building, the way you just round a corner and it's right there, with no grand anticipatory staircase, no giant surrounding field.

Inside, the decorations are fairly understated (for Italy). But it's the proportions that move you anyway.

I can't escape the sense that this building is part of the natural order of things. Some of this is because of the way the light from the ocellus moves across the interior, the disc of light traveling in something akin to an orbit, across structural lines that seem to trace the paths of other orbits. Some of it is because, well, the building does mimic the shape of the planet. Some of it is the elegance of proportion (and I suppose in this the building essentially borrows the elegance of the universe, to use Brian Greene's phrase).

In any case, yes, a building like this more or less has to be universal. To declare otherwise is to miss the point.

Roman Holiday

2008-11-02T15:54:00.005-06:00

Spent the weekend in Rome, as a birthday present to myself. Because of All Saints' Day the Vatican Museum was closed, so this turned into a tour of archeology and architecture, and I'll have to go back for the art. I still managed to see a lot: St. Peter's (above, during Latin Mass with the choir and homily, no less); the Pantheon; San Pietro in Vincoli, with Michaelangelo's Moses; Sant'Andrea delle Valle; the Colosseum; the Forum, the Palatine Hill, the Capitoline Hill, and that whole series of ruins; Trajan's Column (surrounded by heavy construction at present, unfortunately); the Campidoglio at night; the Spanish Steps; the Trevi Fountain; the Keats house; the Palazzo Barberini and the National Gallery of Antique Art; the crypt of the Capuchin monks; and of course the Piazza Venezia and quite a lot of Bernini fountains and all the other landmarks one passes so often that even in two days they almost become commonplace.

I took about 400 photos, so I have a lot of sorting and catching up to do. I think this one's going to have to happen in installments.

Cortona, without a map

2008-10-27T03:08:00.009-05:00

I took a day trip to Cortona last week. It may be my favorite place in Tuscany so far, which is saying something. I cleverly left my map at home, but the centro is small enough that it's pretty easy to find your way around. What would be a real help is a map in topographical relief, because even by the standards of Tuscan hill towns, these are some steep streets.

Cortona is at the southernmost point of Tuscany, near the Umbrian border, where the mountains get steeper and craggier. It's at the end of a road full of hairpin turns, on top of a formation that blurs the line between mountain and hill. I'm pretty sure it's at least as high as A Mountain at home (and for non-Las Cruces people, no, that's not a typo; people call it A Mountain and there's a big A painted on its west face).

The streets are full of the odd little tunnels and expressionist angles I've come to expect from Italian hill towns. And did I mention the streets were steep? Some of the grades have to be close to 30 degrees.

Even more than Assisi, Cortona feels like a quiet mountain retreat. St. Francis sometimes came there to pray and meditate. I found the 13th-century Church of St. Francis--sort of the antithesis of his grand basilica.

Inside are some masterpieces by 16th- and 17th-century painters, along with traces of the original frescoes and the relics of Brother Elias, who led the Franciscan order after St. Francis's death. I was the only visitor. The interior was entirely silent--and I mean the silence of pine woods, not the silence of cathedrals filled with tourists.

One of the things I really wanted to see was Le Celle, a ways outside the city walls, a combination of natural caverns and human construction that used to be home to a hermit. I didn't find it, but the walk was gorgeous. There aren't enough greens in any set of paints to capture a Tuscan hillside.

For all I love city life, I'm still a child of the Southwest, and my heart leaps like a mountain goat whenever I encounter a landscape like this.

On the way I passed the Chiesa di Santa Maria delle Grazie al Calcinaio (Church of St. Mary of the Grace at the Limepit). The collision of old and new in Italy is often jarring, sometimes funny (as when we saw a man in full Arezzo jousting regalia speed past on a motor scooter), but here it seemed perfectly natural for a Renaissance dome to be rising out of the terraced olive farms.

Yes, I'll be going back to Cortona.

Assisi

2008-10-26T14:32:00.006-05:00

Looks like my picture-posting abilities are back, and not a moment too soon. Here's the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli, which I was talking about yesterday:

From here I took the bus up to Assisi proper, which sits on the spine of what my Frommer's guide calls "the rise to Mt. Subasio." (I'm not sure if a rise is an actual geographical term or not, and I can't think of a better way to say it than that anyway.) In the noon sun the Romanesque city walls looked almost white--lighter and a bit pinker than those of Tuscan hill towns.

The Piazza di San Francesco is edged with Romanesque colonnades as well, though the Basilica of San Francesco is gothic. Currently the Piazza is occupied by an exhibit (or a sculpture?) consisting of a large group of black boulders, each bearing a rectangular groove that looks as though water might flow through it at some point. It's supposed to be some sort of monument to peace, I gathered from a poster. It does seem appropriately Franciscan.

Inside the Basilica there's an upper church and a lower church, both heavily frescoed, in true gothic fashion. These frescoes are masterworks by Giotto and Cimabue, though. The colors, especially the blues, are glorious. And it's wonderfully fitting that the cathedral for this saint, whose thinking helped pave the way for Renaissance humanism, should be adorned by the work of a painter whose frescoes helped pave the way for the Renaissance in art.

This week has been a study in what it is and is not acceptable to do as a tourist. In some cathedrals (such as the Siena Duomo), photography is fine as long as you don't use flash or tripod; in some places it's not allowed but the attendants grudgingly tolerate it; in some places the attendants take the rule very seriously. Most cathedrals also request silence. Some places (Santa Maria degli Angeli) get it; some places (San Marco, in Venice) don't. San Francesco has solved the latter problem by having an attendant say "Silenzio!" sternly into a lavalier microphone whenever people get too loud. A sound system seems decidedly un-Franciscan, but I suppose it's better than giving the place over to the tourists, Venice-style.

The place where the flashbulbs upset me was the crypt, below the lower church, where the relics of St. Francis are housed. I can understand wanting to claim that memory somehow. People seem to feel a special kinship with St. Francis (the Assisi tourist shops bear this out; they sell icons and olive-wood rosaries and crosses, not just typical kitsch). Maybe people feel a connection precisely because of his humanism. So many of the earlier saints seem not quite real. There's something close to glee in the reliquaries in Siena--ridiculously ornate arrangements of bones, and a jeweled gold case for the head of one saint--that brings into the high relief the medieval Christian desire to triumph over the flesh. Anyway, there's a pervasive reverence in St. Francis's crypt. Except when someone tries to sneak a picture and the red-eye reducing strobe goes off.

It seemed more appropriate to me to commemorate the visit with an act requiring silence and contemplation, so I sat in one of the pews and drew.

Obviously it's just a sketch, and the area immediately around the relics was blocked from view by the steady stream of visitors. You can sort of see, behind the main tomb, the darker vault that houses a tiny chapel. Around the tomb are three memorials to St. Francis's companions. In front of it are, appropriately enough, lilies and peace lilies.

Assisi is a lovely town to wander through. I spent a lot of time looking at menus and poking my head into food shops, trying to figure out the ways Umbrian food differs from Tuscan food, and also hoping to get a taste of wild boar (cinghiale) salami, a regional specialty. What I can tell so far is that Umbrian food seems to use meat more, especially game meats; that it looooves its local porcini and truffles (and after a taste of black truffle relish I knew why); that it uses tomatoes less than Tuscan food; and that it's more inclined to add fruit to dishes rather than serve it separately. Of course, this is all a highly subjective, unscientific analysis. I'm clearly going to have to get an Umbrian cookbook to know for sure.

In the Piazza del Comune is the building now known as Santa Maria Minerva, which was a pagan temple in the days long before St. Francis. It's glorious on the outside.

Stepping inside is one of the most jarring architectural experiences I've ever had, because the interior is now a Baroque church, and there's gloppy gilt scrollwork everywhere.

Many of the side streets are much like those in other old Italian towns, steep and narrow. Assisi's streets seem to have more greenery than the norm.

At the top of the town is Rocco Maggiore, the old watch tower.

It's quite a climb, but the view from the top is fantastic. The peak is exposed to the wind, and the air is full of the snapping of the banners on the ramparts. One local thought it was a good day for kite-flying, and he was right:

Below, you can just see the Duomo (San Rufino) and the basilica of Santa Chiara.

A test

2008-10-25T14:50:00.002-05:00

I think I may have found a work-around to fix the photo problem. It involves using code, though, at which I am pretty much a novice. So let's hope this works.

If I did that right, this should be an image of the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli, in the valley below the medieval center of Assisi. It's a really interesting church--a combination of neo-Baroque and neo-Classical architecture, which makes it fairly restrained, as Italian churches go. The side chapels have frescoes, but the central nave is white and unadorned. It uses natural light beautifully; the interior is almost bright.

But what makes it really unusual is that there's another church inside it. The 10th-11th century Porziuncola Chapel, the birthplace of the Franciscan order, is under the dome. It's small, maybe the size of a portable classroom, and--apart from the typically medieval gilt art behind the altar--humble and rough. The threshold bears the legend "Hic locus sanctus est." People approach it with real reverence, too. There have been posted pleas for silence at every cathedral and church I've visited, but here they were unnecessary.

Postcript: Okay, that posted a photo, but not the one I was hoping to post. This may take some work.

Day trips

2008-10-24T10:01:00.000-05:00

Lots of day trips through Tuscany this week. Internet at the Villa has been problematic this week, and I can't currently post photos to my blog. Which is a shame, because I have a lot of photos. Not just from the week's trips--Siena, Florence (to the Pitti and the Boboli Garden), and Cortona--but also from the class's excursion to Venice and Padua a couple of weeks ago. Tomorrow I'm heading to Perugia (whose annual chocolate festival is this week) and Assisi. I'd like to think that by the time I get back this website will be working as it should be.

An embarrassment of riches

2008-10-18T09:11:00.005-05:00

Well, this is the sort of thing that makes people move permanently to Tuscany: the Arezzo international food festival. I'd have looked like a hopelessly touristy rube, but I wish I'd brought my camera all the same. At home, if you found food like this in one overpriced aisle of Whole Foods, you'd squeal with delight. If you found a specialty shop that carried it, you'd become a devoted customer. But here? Here it goes on for blocks.

Might as well start with the cheese. I've never seen so much Pecorino in one place. Giant wheels of it: staggionato (my favorite), fresco, crusted in herbs, crusted in hazelnuts, with bits of black truffles. There were booths devoted solely to goat cheeses. One booth had some of the best Gouda I've ever tasted, as well as the greenest cheese I've ever seen: Gouda made with basil.

Speaking of truffles, the Arezzo area has apparently had a bumper crop this year. This is the first time I've ever seen fresh truffles in the flesh, for sale by the kilo. Apart from that plenty of sellers had jars of truffles in oil, truffle-porcini relish to put on pasta or bread, truffle pate, and so forth. Truffles aren't prohibitively expensive here, so it's really unfortunate that I don't have a kitchen. One kind seller--after sharing a taste of a local red wine--took the time to explain that, to make a little truffle flavor go a long way, you warm tiny bits of truffle in olive oil, so the truffle aroma permeates the oil, and then you just make sure the oil has thoroughly coated your pasta (or whatever). This combination of flavor, simplicity, and economy is one of my favorite aspects of Tuscan food.

Then the honey. Varietal honey is a big deal here. You can get honey made from acacia, girasole (sunflowers), millefiori (which I think translates as wildflowers), orange blossoms, lemon blossoms, chestnut blossoms, and several others. Each variety has a characteristic color, aroma, and flavor. My favorite so far is lemon, by a mile, but girasole is quite good as well. Chestnut honey is quite dark, and the flavor is soapy and bitter; I wonder if it's close to the flavor of unroasted chestnuts, which I hear are pretty awful. Anyway, one way to eat honey is to drizzle it over a slice of Pecorino. No day can be bad in which you have tasted that.

The bread. Several of the forno booths had giant six-foot loaves of Tuscan bread (white, crusty, no salt) they were selling by the chunk. There were also olive breads, foccaccia, pastries, strudels, and crepes.

The meat. Prosciutto is relatively inexpensive here, a standard part of the diet (although on the whole Italians eat far less meat than Americans do). I have no idea what the term is for a large chunk of prosciutto--a hock?--but they were hanging everywhere, along with pancetta and sausages of every conceivable variety. At least two booths had boar's heads stuffed with raw sausage, one of those frank, sort of medieval reminders that meat was once living--the sort of thing you don't get in the more squeamish States. Somehow the effect wasn't grisly; it just heightened the sense that I was walking through a still life by one of the Dutch masters.

And oh, the olives. This area is the source of some of the best olive oils in the world. And the olives themselves--Diavolo Nero (large and black), Dolce (large and almost the same green as asparagus, with a light, mild flavor), al forno (oven-cured, black, intense and sweet), calamata, Sicilian (a meaty green, spicy, with red pepper)--make me wonder how anyone could possibly be contented with a wan American specimen stuffed with a limp pimiento.

What else? Onions. Garlic. Wine. Chocolate. (I avoided that because I'm going to the Perugia chocolate festival next week; I think it's possible I may never leave.) Preserves. The most beautiful dried fruit I've ever seen--kiwi, mango, fig, strawberry, orange, cherry, apricot, all retaining its color somehow. Chestnuts are a big part of local cuisine; several places had roast chestnuts, and I even saw sacks of chestnut flour. Chestnut trees, incidentally, grow up and down the street that leads into town. The nuts are encased in spiny sheaths that look like little green and brown blowfish:

It's the sort of thing that makes me marvel that anyone ever figured out it was edible.

And all that, in a place that looks like this:

How did anyone ever stop eating and admiring the landscape long enough to start the Renaissance?

Mask-making, part I

2008-10-17T18:00:00.002-05:00

Our work at the Accademia this fall involves a collaboration with the Arezzo Liceo Musicale on a production of The Persians, by Aeschylus. It's quite an undertaking--between actors and musicians there are something like forty performers. It involves three languages (English, Italian, and Ancient Greek), dancing, singing, instruments, and possibly some acrobatics. And as far as I can tell Italy is a nation without a single stage manager. Nonetheless, the whole thing is really exciting. Not least because I'm to play Atossa, the Persian queen. And it's going to be a mask role.

This afternoon Zach (who's playing Xerxes) and I had plaster casts taken of our faces. We were working with Taylor, an alum of the Accademia who lives here in Arezzo now. He played Don Giovanni as he worked, and opened the windows of the mask studio to let in the late afternoon sun.

Certain aspects of mask-making are a study in repurposing. For example, you have to start by coating your face--especially the eyebrows and eyelashes--in goop that will keep the plaster from sticking to it too badly. I don't know what's traditionally used, but what apparently works very well is...well, let's call it lubricant of a rather intimate nature. (Taylor said he got some strange looks when he bought it in such quantities.)

Anyway, once we'd slathered our faces in it, we further protected ourselves by sticking bits of toilet paper to our brows and lashes--when your face is covered in lubricant it's no problem getting toilet paper to adhere--and then covering our hair, baboushka-style, in saran wrap. So there's another entry on the long list of Odd Things I Have Found Myself Doing Because of Theater.

And then Taylor stuck the strips of plaster to us and let them dry. This involves sitting very still, blind, not talking, for about 30 or 45 minutes. I've heard that it makes some people panic, but I thought it was terrifically calming, not unlike a spa treatment. (In fact, the soap with which you wash off residual plaster and lubricant has sand in it, so I did have something of an exfoliating scrub.) Taylor steered us into the sun to help the plaster dry. I know we looked strange, two motionless, featureless creatures, draped in aprons, standing at the windows of the villa.

When the plaster dried, he peeled it off us. That gave him two shells shaped like us. He'll fill them with plaster to create positives of our faces. Then, for stability, he'll mount them on boards.

But the really exciting parts are that I'll get to keep a duplicate of the Atossa mask, that I'll be able to take home the plaster positive for further mask-making, and that I'm going to have the sort of role that teaches mask skills you can use all your life.

A walk to the grocery store

2008-10-16T06:52:00.005-05:00

Intensive classes and rehearsals and a couple of short trips have kept me from posting over the past few weeks. I have a lot to catch up on. Here's the first bit, a short photo essay. This is how we get to the grocery store:

Turn here:

Then, pause to admire nature...

And pass this:

Then, the way back:

Pause to wave hello (the yellow building is the Accademia):

Keep climbing, and admire some more nature:

Climb one last, very steep hill:

And turn here:

God, I love Tuscany.

First commedia intensive

2008-09-16T11:54:00.006-05:00

We spent all day with Marcello today: three and a half hours of physical drills, then some lecturing on history and the traditions of the different Masks, and finally another hour or so of some character-specific physical work.

I think people tend to associate large gestures with commedia dell'arte, but actually precision is the byword of the physical work. The principle at work is essentially the William Strunk rule: it's not that you shouldn't gesture, but that every gesture must tell. That is, you must know the physical and emotional states that drive it, and it must have a clear beginning and end. Uncertain, ungrounded, or unspecific gesturing dissipates the character. As Marcello explained, when you're working with a mask, it can become an expressionless face if the expression of the body is unclear.

But the gesture of commedia is a lot bigger, in that it originated in outdoor performance, and if you're pointing with your right hand the line of the action might extend all the way to your left toes. (I think a good actor, regardless of the tradition in which he's working, understands every gesture with his whole body, even if it only shows in the slight twitch of a shoulder. But in commedia that entire understanding shows, so it has to be clear and precise, and that means your muscles and your lungs have to be up to it.)

So we did a lot of drills that felt like nothing so much as barre work--isolating muscle groups, playing with posture and breath and balance. (Marcello--demonstrating the difference between a 1500s Arlecchino and a 1700s Arlecchino--explained that late commedia did in fact become quite balletic, when it was popular in France.) A balance drill, for example, might involve a sort of clown arabesque that crumples by degrees and then all at once regains its original form:

Or you might have to switch back and forth between two different styles of running, both with a lot of side-to-side motion, but each with a different posture and degree of limb tension:

The breath work reminded me a bit of my first retreat with Molly Lyons, when we worked extensively with the connection between the emotional impulse and the breath. Many actors pause just after inhaling, and use that pause as a sort of emotional stop. Not pausing can open the door to all sorts of interesting emotions, and it lets you plunge into the line before you feel quite ready to speak--you don't want to feel too safe, in scene work. Today, though, we prolonged the pause, timed it to a gesture, played with it. Of course, meeting the physical and vocal demands of commedia involves great discipline of breath. Marcello had us "draw" with three breaths--using one breath to draw the sea, the next to draw a boat, and the third to fill the sail with air.

We repeated the drawing a number of times, envisioning different nautical conditions to play with pacing and speed and force.

Then there was a lot of work with space objects--breaking down our interactions with nonexistent things into discrete, repeatable gestures. Echoes of the mime workshop I took years ago, when we discussed "clicking" onto objects as we picked them up and "unclicking" when we put them down. This is a bit more involved and stylized, but that's fine. It's important for characters--especially the zanni--to be able to enter immense flights of fancy and to make those fantasies concretely real onstage.

Marcello doesn't really speak English. We have translators for the lectures, but often don't need them; as he notes, a really good commedia performer can be understood regardless of language.

So. Two weeks I've been here. I can feel some of the changes in my body already--daily yoga will do that.

And. In the same two weeks I've been out of the country, its entire midsection has flooded, one of my favorite artists has died, this Palin character has been thrust on the public, and the banks have collapsed. What the hell, people? I trusted you to keep things in okay shape while I was gone.

San Fabiano

2008-09-14T15:53:00.004-05:00

This afternoon, having just heard about the death of David Foster Wallace, I went for a run/hike in San Fabiano, the area just outside Arezzo that is home to the villa. It's mostly farmland--grapes and olives on old, old estates--and the terrain is somewhere between hills and mountain foothills.

I got high up into the hills above the villa, on narrow dirt roads. At one point the ground under my feet was strangely reflective, and I realized that among the stones and pebbles were a bunch of old tiles. I have no clue what they were from: an ancient mosaic? a more recent renovation?

Meanwhile a storm was rolling into the valley.

The trees in the foreground are an olive grove. Far in the background on the left you can see the Arezzo Duomo--the high cathedral spire--and on the right you can see the villa, the yellow building a little closer.

I hiked most of the way out--getting to know the terrain--and ran back. Got well and properly rained on, and it felt fantastic.

Have I sorted out how I feel about DFW's death? Not even close. DFW was the inspiration, after all, for my first published essay, and--as much as I have heroes--one of mine. And though it isn't the same as losing a friend, it's hard to read his essays without feeling as though you've gotten to know him.

There has been far too much death this year. I know that as a clown I must deal with death routinely, and help other people laugh at it, but boy, that's a hard lesson sometimes.

In which Tuscany makes a strong argument for the existence of Eden

2008-09-13T15:02:00.007-05:00

It's been raining on and off since yesterday afternoon. Here that means the skies go all painterly.

Joe said recently that I seemed to be living in an artist's utopia, and I think that's pretty much right. The walls echo with music. If you want to try something--whether it's a scene or a new song--you can find someone talented to help you out. The very colors and flavors and language of Italy seem purposely designed to stimulate the creative impulse.

I went to a little art supply store this afternoon for a sketch pad, and of course I wound up buying some watercolor pencils. It's just a little different, buying art supplies here. The paint labeled siena (one n in Italian) means something more when you're only an hour or two away from Siena and the colors of Italian earth surround you in the streets and the walls of the city.

As I was paying I noticed the jars of powdered pigments on the shelves behind the counter. If color has a Platonic ideal, it is there, in that brilliance. I mentioned the pigments and the owner got very excited. They were for frescoes, he explained. He still mixed them in the traditional way. They did not always perfectly match the ancient colors, but they were as close as anyone can get today. And then he took me through the store and showed me all the different ways one can use classical pigments, how you can actually feel the difference in weight between a tube of oil paint made with synthetic pigments and a tube of the same size made with the old minerals, and so on. And my God, a little bottle of pure cobalt, bluer than any blue you've ever seen, seeming to emanate light--!

I left feeling a direct kinship to the Renaissance, in an entirely new way, as if all those artists were still around me, breathing the rainy air, asking their immortal questions.

On my way back home I stopped at the city's medieval wall and decided to climb up to take a look. A fellow student commented this afternoon that you can't turn around here without discovering another beautiful view, and yeah, he's right:

There's plenty I need to write about the week's classes, about a fantastic seminar on clown and clowns, about everything we're doing and learning, but in due time. Sometimes you just need to let yourself be knocked down by beauty.

Ragazzoccio

2008-09-09T14:18:00.003-05:00

When I announced I was going to Italy, lots of friends seemed to expect me to come home toting an Italian boyfriend, regardless of how my actual American boyfriend might feel about that.

Here's the perfect compromise: an Italian boyfriend for Little Girl, the Gibson I left at home. I call him Ragazzoccio. (It's only fair to assume that she, like I, would fall for a bad boy.)

I'm very happy to be able to play again.

In other news, I got the name of our quarter wrong when I described the joust. It's Porta Crucifera, not Crucifizione. (I wouldn't mention it except it seems like the kind of thing that could get you beat up.)

And classes have started. You can now tell which students are in the theater program because we all grimace before we sit down. We've been using our thigh muscles a lot in movement class. But it's wonderful: a combination of yoga and Feldenkrais and acrobatics for two hours, first thing every morning. I'm trying to figure out how I can maintain this kind of rigor when I get back to the States. Because it's the sort of thing I've always wanted from my theatrical life.

Giostra

2008-09-07T13:43:00.010-05:00

Wow, Arezzo takes its jousting seriously. I thought it was going to be sort of Ren Faire-ish, but instead everyone was displaying their team colors, fights broke out, and we heard an endless series of chants about the promiscuity of the girls of the rival quarter. (The city is divided into quarters, and each quarter has a jousting team. The Accademia is in the quarter of the Crucifizione, whose heraldry flies on all the neighborhood lampposts.)

So, everything got started with processions and drumming and trumpets...

...and we crowded into a piazza, with people peering out of upstairs windows just as they'd do on a rooftop in Wrigleyville...

...and then the medieval color guard performed a really quite impressive routine involving a lot of precision tossing and catching of banners.

(What the pictures can't show: the trumpets suddenly going from processional fanfares into the theme from Pirates of the Carribean.)

Then another procession, involving knights in full armor and absurdly exaggerated headpieces that must have been painfully heavy--eighteen-inch bronze eagles perched atop their helmets and so on. (These pictures also show the net separating the jousters from the bleacher crowd; I'm not sure whether it was for our protection or theirs.)

Then, the jousting, which proved pretty much impossible to photograph. Each team sends two riders to charge at a statue that represents a Saracen. The Saracen is equipped with a target, a swinging lead mace-style weight, and a whip. And once the lance hits the target, the Saracen spins around very fast. The riders are (I think) awarded points based on the accuracy of their hit, whether the whip or the weight hits them, and whether their lance splinters on impact (which counts double). There's much cheering and speculation about the score. The spectators up in the surrounding buildings hold up their fingers to show the groundlings what they think the score will be. And a trumpet fanfare before the loudspeaker announces "Punti: Cinque" or whatever.

Crucifizione's archrivals, San Andrea, won. I have heard that they're despised because they're the rich privileged neighborhood. Also that there's some sort of communist-fascist rivalry there, although I no longer remember which quarter was which. I do know that in our quarter they are hated enough that one of the Crucifizione supporters wore a sticker--the sort of thing that had been printed and mass-produced--that read Bianco Verde Bastardo. (The San Andrea colors are white and green.)

So we trooped home, defeated, but still, in one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen.

And now the villa is full of the sounds of the music students singing and running through virtuosic piano pieces, and it's time to read about the history of commedia dell'arte. Tomorrow morning we start Feldenkrais, acrobatics, and voice.

Damn the mosquitos! Full speed ahead!

2008-09-06T16:16:00.003-05:00

First serious discussion of the academic curriculum today. Oh, WOW. Acrobatics, Feldenkrais, commedia with Marcello Bartolli, voice, the aesthetics/philosophy course...and this is before the mask-making workshop and of course clown. I am so impatient for classes to begin.

This weekend, there will be jousting.

2008-09-05T14:58:00.002-05:00

Learned a bit more about the villa: It was built in 1560, and it originally served as the summer home of a bishop. The children of Cosimo de Medici came here to study with said bishop.

There really will be jousting this weekend. Arezzo has a big medieval festival.

It's also apparently possible to find places in Arezzo where the Decameron takes place--notably the famous well. I'll have to make a Field Guide post on the Decameron while I'm here, then.

It's been very interesting to discover the reputation of Chicago theater. Both the faculty members I've talked to have been quick to praise Chicago theater, and to say that the work in Chicago these days seems more interesting and vital than what's in New York.

The truism also holds that Chicago is the biggest small town in the world. Even here, it turns out, I'm running into friends of Chicago theater people. A fellow staffer did his undergrad work with Sean Graney, for example. So there goes any lingering illusion of escapism.

And yes, this place is idyllic and gorgeous, but OH MY GOD THE MOSQUITOS. I am covered in red welts. The windows, being Renaissance windows, have no screens. I may regret saying this when the fresh figs are a distant memory and we're all shivering on our eight daily hours of state-rationed heat, but as far as the bugs are concerned winter can't come soon enough. All in all it's still a small quibble. But when you are hot and itchy and reeking of apparently ornamental bug spray, you tend to lose your sense of proportion.

Life at the villa

2008-09-04T15:41:00.003-05:00

This is the view from the villa's lending library: the vineyard immediately adjacent. We have a few vines and a fig tree on the premises, and apparently you can walk to one of the neighboring vineyards with an empty jug and have them fill it with table chianti.

The city center is a short hike away, down a steep one-lane road along which cars hurtle at terrific speeds despite the numerous blind driveways and side streets. You turn right at the aqueduct, and walk a ways more to the scala mobile, a series of escalators--why not?--that help you up the hill towards a high medieval wall. Apart from the aqueducts and the medieval walls and the Duomo, there are aspects of the landscape that remind me of Las Cruces, especially in this heat: the ground tends to be dry and rocky, with tufts of scrub grass rather than an even green cover, and sometimes you glimpse a tiny lizard scurrying out of the way.

Got my first glimpse of the week-by-week curriculum today (classes start next week, after everyone has settled in). It looks like we'll have daily movement and voice work for the first month, which is fantastic. Less clown than I was hoping for--some classes are of necessity based on the schedules of performers who teach when they can--but at least the clown will be all day, every day, while it lasts.

Anyone who goes to Italy should document the food, so I should mention the fantastic spicy mushroom-tomato ragout I had last night at a bruschetteria. For free. They left out a number of primi piatti--toasted bread, foccaccia, squares of puff-pastry panini with prosciutto and mozzarella, beets, a pineapple-ham salad, mortadella, deviled eggs--and people sat out in the plaza and chatted and snacked over their beer and wine. It's a very nice way to eat.

Home, for the next four months

2008-09-02T10:33:00.002-05:00

I'm installed in my room in Tuscany. I'm too tired, hungry, and jet-lagged to write more. It's going to be a race: whether I can finish dinner before I fall asleep. But I'm here.

addio, addio

2008-09-01T13:32:00.003-05:00

In the terminal at O'Hare. Packing four months' worth of stuff into a single duffel bag is a grueling experience. I think I was pretty disciplined (certainly compared to the way I used to pack in college), but still, four months is four months, and the bag was, predictably, over the weight limit. Once I picked it up it was clear it would be a bad idea to try to carry my guitar too. So I said goodbye to Little Girl this morning too. There's a campus guitar for general use (I am skeptical of its quality and availability, but we shall see), and I can always try to find a cheap guitar in Arezzo.

I have a stopover in Frankfurt, so all the boarding announcements are in English and German. Disconcerting. The process of studying Italian has already made some German bubble back up to the surface. God knows what language I'll be speaking when I get to Arezzo.

Goodbye, Funny-Dumpy-Lumpy

2008-08-31T17:51:00.002-05:00

Of course, of COURSE, getting rid of the car would turn out to take the shape of an elaborate clown gag.

Of COURSE after the last buyer flaked--three times--the wrecker who was supposed to show up at 1:00 didn't arrive.

Of COURSE I couldn't find his number, even though I had made a point of writing it down.

Of COURSE I had to call five other wreckers before I could even talk to someone who could take the car today.

Of COURSE he would only pay half the price of the other guy.

Of COURSE when he did show up, it took 20 minutes of wrestling and prying and pulling to get the plates off the car. ("It's almost like it don't want to leave you," he said, which would have been funny if it didn't feel so spookily accurate.)

Of COURSE I still got a little emotional about saying goodbye to the car: the first car I ever bought; the car that seemed too nice for me when I first drove it home; the car that has seen me through a whole lot of tough times; the car that has caused its fair share of tough times too; the car I have written songs about.

Of COURSE as soon as I sat down at the computer I found the first wrecker's phone number.

Oh. Ohhh, clown. What a life I have chosen for myself.

In bocca al lupo

2008-08-28T23:27:00.003-05:00

My going-away present from Joe:

I don't know if the inscription is legible at this resolution, but it's a traditional backstage pre-show salute that translates to "Into the mouth of the wolf!" The proper response is "May he choke!" or "May he die!" (Or, depending on who you ask, "Cut out his throat.")

I've heard it comes from Italian opera, though I don't know this for sure. Hasty online fact-checking: The Boston Globe, though its Italian spelling is a bit dubious, says the expression is from opera; other sites say it's from Italian theater; one site says it's just what you used to say when you were leaving the tavern late at night. In any case, it's the Italian equivalent of "Break a leg." Probably the best explanation I've seen of the expression--and of why it's suited to performance--is here, on the site of a summer commedia program.

And yes, it's perfect and lovely. I'm lucky.

The very, very, very long farewell

2008-08-27T12:05:00.002-05:00

It will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with my clown work that at 10:00, the hour when the man was supposed to come and buy my car, I was frantically ransacking the apartment, looking for the key.

Half an hour later I had the key. But still no buyer.

Finally called him. This guy is really fantastic at not letting you know when his plans have changed, even if your plans depend on his. We have rescheduled. Again. If he flakes again...oy, I don't want to think about it.

I can't shake the feeling that the car is going to find some way of clinging to me, like one of those exceptionally persistent cats that manages to follow its former owner across the continent even though it has one eye, a bum leg, no spleen, a colony of fleas that has evolved its own sophisticated metropolis, and a case of distemper strong enough to kill a tiger. I'll be in class in Tuscany, rehearsing some intricate and dangerous bit of slapstick, and suddenly, from outside: Honk.

And I'll look up, and my scene partner will clobber me.

Words to travel by

2008-08-22T20:42:00.001-05:00

Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.
The soul that knows it not, knows no release
From little things;
Knows not the livid loneliness of fear,
Nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear
The sound of wings.
How can life grant us boon of living, compensate
For dull grey ugliness and pregnant hate
Unless we dare
The soul's dominion? Each time we make a choice, we pay
With courage to behold the restless day,
And count it fair.

--Amelia Earhart

Friday night on the steps of St. Alphonsus

2008-08-16T21:17:00.002-05:00

Here's the story of the best thing I've done in a while.

Full moon. Cool Chicago summer night. Corner of Wellington and Lincoln. St. Alphonsus, a large church with an improbably ornate gothic doorway, where the entire cast of The Mysterious Elephant was hiding out in the shadows, musical instruments in hand--two guitars, a banjo, a violin, a French horn, a children's xylophone, some hand percussion.

A guy named Micah had asked us to help us surprise the woman he described as the love of his life. A few weeks ago, he told us, they had a magical moment when they watched Mysterious Elephant and drove home singing "Oh, elephant, elephant." He wanted to give her another magical moment because, he said, she deserved to have a lot of them.

So we watched them come across Lincoln, out of what looked like a garden party. He led her up the steps. Scott (in semi-costume as Cristoff: fake dead arm paired with a red T-shirt and shorts) wobbled up to them. I think maybe she thought he was drunk at first. But then she recognized him. We heard a peal of delighted laughter, and we came out of the shadows onto the landing. (Is it a landing when it's outside? Especially when it's outside a church? Porch seems too modest a word. But anyway.)

We sang the Elephant song, with the last lyrics changed:

We surprised you
Micah has asked us to
He'd like to ask you...

And that was when he showed her the ring. I think by then most of us were already crying. She was. She kissed him like she meant it. Everyone applauded. There was a cheer from the garden party. The cast turned around and walked back to the recording studio.

My god, I love being an artist. It's hard, it's impossibly frustrating and contrary, there's no money to speak of, but I wouldn't trade a moment like that for the world.

This is really happening, isn't it?

2008-08-08T14:26:00.002-05:00

My student visa arrived in the mail today, and I've sent the last tuition check, and yeah, I'm really going to Italy. I don't know why I'm having such a hard time believing it. It's just been such a distant dream for so long that, even though I've spent a long time working to make it happen, the idea that it actually would happen seemed less fact than faith.

The first time I even thought of doing something like this was when I first studied with 500 Clown--so, fall 2003? I remember Paul talking about the year he spent at Dell'Arte as a gift to himself. And I understood it logically then, but now--I'm as surprised and delighted as if I'd just opened a fantastic present.

Can't really linger over this post because there's so much to do: the car to clean out and sell, the Italian to study. I think I have a pretty solid hold on the past tenses now. I love that Italian has a sort of plupluperfect, the trapassato remoto, for events occurring before the events in the pluperfect, the trapassato prossimo. It does make you understand the poetic appeal of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, however wobbly the science: in Italy you're not just a woman with a past; you can be a woman with a remote past, an immediate past, an imperfect past, an absolute past.

I should go work on the future tenses, and that's not just metaphor.

Further Adieux

2008-07-30T22:10:00.003-05:00

Here's how to depart like a clown: Quit your job, and then get laid off two weeks before your scheduled last day.

Ha. Wow. I can't imagine anyone being more prepared to leave than I am, or better personal circumstances in which to be laid off, but it's still the sort of thing that leaves you dazed.

This means I can sell the car sooner, and I spent part of the evening drafting that ad. That'll be a little sad too. I've dreamed of living carless for a long time, but this is the first car I ever actually bought, and she's an old friend. An old and faithful and very tired friend.

Last night we watched Blues Brothers in Grant Park, and that's a fitting farewell to this city. (Maybe more so because the rain got unbearably heavy right around "It's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses.") When people cheer for the first shot of the skyline, you know you're in a pretty good place. (The shot of Wrigley Field, incidentally, drew mingled cheers and boos. Okay, I can understand being a Sox fan, but surely you're not going to argue that the Cell is superior to Wrigley? I mean...it's just not. It's just not.)

So, anyway. Now I have more time in which to say goodbye to the city, and write, and pack the new duffel bag, and all that. I think that'll wind up being good, really. It's disconcerting, but it'll be good.

I hope this doesn't mean the car is going to crap out right as someone is test-driving it.

Farewell to the Elephant

2008-07-20T23:56:00.002-05:00

Struck The Mysterious Elephant this morning. I've said goodbye to a fair number of shows in the Chopin basement. It's odd, the places that come to be centers of your life.

And now that delightful show is gone and so there is really and truly nothing between me and Italy, and oh, oh wow, is it happening soon. Soon enough for me to panic just a bit this afternoon. Soon enough for me to scrub out the fridge and buy a new shower curtain liner in anticipation of subletters. Soon soon. Soon soon soon soon.

Another thing recently gotten out of the way: the possibility of an insanely perfect role in a high-paying show that starts rehearsals the very day I leave. Ah, well. Good to check things off the list.

A rather large departure

2008-07-01T07:46:00.005-05:00

Oh my sweet lord, do I have a lot to do.

Haven't done a lot of posting here because I've been busy rehearsing the fantastic new Strange Tree show, and most of my writing energy has gone towards a couple of nonfiction projects. But now the show has opened, the folks at the day job have been informed, and I can announce the next big step:

Two months from today I'm leaving for Italy to study clown at its source--commedia dell'arte at the Accademia dell'arte in Tuscany.

This is the campus:

So, yeah, I'm reasonably certain I'm going to be a different artist, and probably a different person, in December.

I can't wait.

The Scottish Play

2008-05-01T21:39:00.003-05:00

So it was really excellent. Not perfect--what is?--but really excellent.

The treatment of the witches was, on the whole, the best I've seen. The costumes--nuns acting as army nurses--were perfect: so clearly not the sleek women of Mac's world, but also immediately conveying a sense of special knowledge, of connection to the mysteries of life and death. The surgical masks even made Banquo's line about their beards make sense, for maybe the first time in any production since the first one. I didn't entirely agree with the cauldron scene; there was no actual cauldron and they simply chanted the lines at breakneck speed, which seemed a loss in a hospital/morgue setting that would have allowed for them to be mixing some sort of creepy pharmacopeia. Having the cadavers act as the apparitions: good, especially since that's another effect that's really almost impossible to do well.

An iambic fundamentalist, to use Peter Hall's phrase, would have had issue with some of the direction, which let the actors play rather loose with the verse. I found myself thinking a couple of times of the dictum "Earn your pauses." This was not so much because the performances were extraordinarily self-indulgent--they weren't, not at all--as because the women's room, despite the fact that this was a very large theater just off Broadway, contained a grand total of four stalls. (This seat-to-seat ratio, so to speak, would get a theater shut down in Chicago.) At intermission the line stretched up a long flight of stairs, down an aisle of the house, and then back up the aisle again. So I waited the whole 15 minutes, but did not get to pee. That part of the experience makes me think that if I ever direct again I will exhort the actors to remember the woman in the seventh row who did not get to pee at intermission: You can keep your pause if it is good enough to make her forget about her bladder.

Stewart himself was terrific. I've never heard anyone hit the ands in "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," but it totally worked that way: Mac resigning himself to an endless, dreary future. And of course the verse supports it; those are stressed syllables.

Lady M--I don't have the actress's name handy--was excellent too. This is one of my dream roles, and I'm calling her excellent without qualification or resentment, so you know she was good.

Joe and I both had issue with the Porter--such a departure from the text that it must have been a directorial choice rather than an acting choice. It just doesn't work to play that scene as anything other than comical. Making the Porter a sinister security guard fits within this production, sure, but it still doesn't work with the text. Or at least, it didn't this way. So many of those lines are so clearly the Porter riffing to amuse himself; this was sort of the Porter riffing to put words in the mouths of the audience members he was interrogating, without a hint of actual play, and it just seemed sociopathic. Maybe I've never recovered from seeing it done exceedingly well in college, with Dan Sullivan--one of the most natural clowns I've ever known--in the role.

Anyway. I need to head to bed--I have not been sleeping enough, and I don't want a discussion of Macbeth to murder sleep. But I do want to mention that when Cannibal Cheerleaders on Crack was first being staged in Chicago (almost ten years before I was in it, so, god, around 1989?) the cast used to gather backstage before shows and sing, to a tune resembling "Row, Row, Row Your Boat":

Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth
Good luck, good luck, good luck
Have a good show, have a good show
Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth! [whistle]

That show was all about flying in the face of tradition, so it was perfect. (Then again, when I was in it, one actor entered running, hit a pool of fake blood, and slid all the way off the edge of the stage, so who's to say the curse wasn't in effect?) But in general, do I believe in that superstition? Yeah. Partly because other people believe it, so if they hear you say "Macbeth" backstage they're thrown off their game, and the show can be affected that way. Partly because the college production of the show, despite being a joy to work on, was one of the most cursed productions I've ever been a part of (a smoke machine that stubbornly refused to work for the cauldron scene, but belched out swampy mists for the interior scenes; a murderer's cape catching fire on stage; the wind picking up a giant metal tray from the banquet scene and blowing it down three stories of stone steps, with tremendous clangor, during a show; and so on). Partly because when I was 18 I'd somehow never heard about the superstition, and before a show--this of The Beggar's Opera--a castmate enlightened me and another cast member. This other cast member promptly said, "Oh, that's BS. Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth." And of course that night's show was the one where everything went wrong--where a woman entered with blood running down her forehead because a trapdoor had just landed on her head. Maybe it is all self-fulfilling prophecy, but who cares? You lose nothing by believing, and you get to share in the spooky collective mystery of theater.

theater in New York

2008-04-27T21:45:00.003-05:00

There's lots more to write about the past week, but first this bit of geekery: On Thursday we saw Patrick Stewart in Macbeth. And Michael Dorn was two rows in front of us.

More when I'm not totally jet-lagged and ready to drop into bed.

So, wow, we did that.

2008-04-19T22:26:00.002-05:00

Back from Orlando. If that's what it's like to earn your living as an actor, I have no complaints. We performed the same material roughly 350 times in four days, which is hard but not impossible, especially when you're in a cast that knows how to play well and keep things from becoming too rote. For this we were put up in a nice hotel, paid handsomely, and fed--oh, god, it was just an orgy of food. (From the closing parties alone I remember mini-beef Wellingtons, pan-seared ahi tuna, some sort of stuffed pork chop, roast turkey with cornbread stuffing and cranberry relish, beef something else, beef skewers, egg rolls, pot stickers, Caesar salad, many different kinds of sushi, veggie quesadillas, nachos, shrimp-aioli-and-prosciutto wraps, bacon-wrapped scallops, shrimp cocktail, mini-burgers, cookies, cheesecake pops dipped in dark chocolate, chocolate mousse shooters, some other kind of fruit dessert shooters, fruit-and-cheese skewers, and several other desserts. I know that wasn't all of it. I should note that I did not personally eat everything. But still.)

We also saw Rod Stewart perform on the last night. I think we all went in thinking, okay, whatever, Rod Stewart, and came out thoroughly impressed. If I can still move that well and use my voice that well at that age, I should be happy.

Things I learned:
1. For work like this, comfortable shoes are mandatory. Ditto lots and lots of water and hot tea. And it doesn't hurt to pack bubble bath for an end-of-day soak.
2. I still know how to improvise. And I like it a whole lot.
3. When you have to interact with the audience and be fairly aggressive about it, it's much easier if you have some sort of mask. I think by the end of the week we were all wearing sunglasses for that shift. Likewise the sunglasses (indoors) seemed to make it easier for the audience to take the aggression as humor and performance, not an actual threat.
4. When you're actually being paid, you can abandon the actor's traditional starvation mentality of seeing free food in front of you and eating until the food is gone. In fact, in circumstances like this, you should abandon it.
5. Food and pay and Rod Stewart notwithstanding, a good ensemble is still one of the best rewards of this whole game.
6. I should try to get out of Chicago every winter. I think I need more sun than I've been getting.

Came back just in time for the premiere party of "Julie's House," the web sitcom I shot last fall. I didn't actually see the showing--by then I was crashing pretty hard. (I also really hate watching myself on camera, so perhaps I was looking for excuses to leave.) But the feedback has all been excellent. And it feels ridiculously cool to come home from an acting job to see the results of another acting job and get the first start-up e-mails about the next acting job.

There was some more exercise in there--given the quantities of food, I was not about to skip my time in the hotel gym--but I can't remember what fell on what day so I'm just going to omit that report. Today:
Running: 2.5 miles
Biking: 7 miles (and some lovely scrapes and bruises to show for it)
15 minutes upper-body weights

Orlando

2008-04-12T20:08:00.002-05:00

Arrived this afternoon in Orlando for the big industrial acting job at McDonald's annual convention. Holy cow. The convention center has a giant two-story staircase that's just been painted so when you enter at lobby level you see two-story Golden Arches. The stairway-decoration budget alone has to exceed the entire marketing budget of any show I've ever been in. And that's just the outside. Inside...well, they're not done setting up yet, and I'm probably not allowed to describe it much lest I reveal some important trade secret, but let's just say, McD's knows how to throw a convention.

Yesterday:
60 minutes elliptical trainer
15 minutes upper-body weights

Day before yesterday:
Running: 4.5 miles
20 minutes lower-body and core weights

Really have no idea what this week is going to bring. It'll be an acting experience unlike any I've ever had before, that's for sure. I'll try to learn a lot.

Yeah, I said it.

2008-04-11T10:35:00.002-05:00

hmmph.

2008-04-09T22:58:00.002-05:00

I seem to exercise more often than I have a reason to post. Yesterday:
Running: intervals
Biking: 7 miles
25 minutes upper-body weights
Crunches, pushups

And we watched No Country for Old Men last night. Jeez. What a creepy movie. Flashes of it keep coming back to me with the intensity of memories I've actually lived. Of course, that's partly because that's the landscape I grew up in, and I've seen it be that still and frightening. And it's partly because nobody does silent menace like the Coens. But a large part is Javier Bardem's performance. By the end he's stalking you, you personally, and he's going to get you, because that's what he does.

Chaplin

2008-04-06T23:00:00.003-05:00

Watched four Chaplin shorts tonight: Easy Street, The Cure, The Adventurer, and The Immigrant. All the same supporting players, clearly functioning well as a clown ensemble. And they must all have had the same makeup artist too, whose main job it was to draw in ever-more-outrageous peaked eyebrows for Eric Carpenter. (Wait. Carpenter? I just saw this guy's last name in four different sets of credits and now I can't remember it. Someone's last name is Carpenter, that's for sure. His definitely starts with a C, but it might not be Carpenter. But he's the big beefy guy with the eyebrows like bat wings--usually Chaplin's nemesis.)

I watched a fair amount of Chaplin as a kid, and I think I've oversimplified him in memory. It's lovely how Chaplin gives us dirt on the Tramp--he's not an uncorrupted innocent. In Adventurer he's an escaped convict, and though the movie never says outright why he was imprisoned, it's clear from the way he lies readily and cadges drinks that he probably deserved it. In Easy Street, when he holds the baby and thinks it's peeing on him, he gives the kid an honest dirty look--not "I'm a cute clown pretending disapproval with a kid," but "You little bastard, you're peeing on my lap." And even as the slapstick punches fly, the honesty of the reactions--the society matron with ice cream down the back of her dress, the woman realizing the spa's healing waters have been spiked and deciding to let her friends find out for themselves--keeps everything solidly empathetic.

30 minutes elliptical trainer
25 minutes lower-body and core weight training
~7 miles biked
Not even close to enough. I'm not sure I had the energy for much more, but still.

2008-04-04T09:34:00.002-05:00

Yesterday:
Running: 3.75 miles
15 minutes upper-body weight training, cut short by evening plans

I think I could easily spend three hours a day in the gym. Clown may simply be an excuse for my obsession.

No...almost certainly not.

Probably.

Good pain.

2008-04-02T21:58:00.002-05:00

35 minutes elliptical trainer
20 minutes lower-body weight training
1 hour Hatha yoga

Ouch. I haven't been doing much yoga lately. It's all well and good to convince yourself that you're exercising enough to compensate, but you can't really fool your muscles.

I've struggled a few times to describe clown to laypeople, but here's John Wright doing it a mere 20 pages into his book:

I'm not interested in the big shoes or baggy trousers of the circus clown so much as clowning as a level of play--an imaginative key into the bizarre--and for some people, this key is immensely liberating. This is a place where you aren't required to be clever or witty or obviously skillful. Here, you're simply invited to generate meaning from the inconsequential and the trivial--from the lowest common denominator of comedy.

A normal person can stand on the beach, look out to sea and scan the horizon, but a clown is unlikely to know what the horizon is. The clown lives in a world of bafflement where one thing leads to another. . . . The bizarre laugh comes from a place of immense honesty, simplicity, and naivety.

Amen.

training

2008-04-01T18:02:00.002-05:00

Spent an hour and a half learning pratfalls last night: down, sprawl, up again. My butt's not at all sore, so I'm at least landing right. We also worked on the mid-stride trip and discovered that it worked much better--that it looked more natural, less calculated--when we tripped with the non-dominant leg.

John can do a 108, the pratfall that looks as though you flip forward and land on your back. (You don't actually land on your back; you land in a squat and then roll back rapidly, as you do for a standard pratfall.) Of course, he's grown up clowning, but I'm still jealous. The last time I took a tumbling class I was pretty close to being able to do a front flip, but it was over a giant soft mat; doing a flip well enough to a) flip with confidence on a hardwood floor and b) land with the control to go into a pratfall feels way out of my league. I guess that's why we practice, and practice, and practice.

I think I may start documenting my physical training in this blog, just for the hell of it, and because it's been such a critical aspect of theater for me. And because I want to be able to run 10 miles at a go by the time I leave for Italy, and making the goal and the progress public may help me along. Anyway, today:
Running: 3.75 miles
30 minutes upper-body weight training
150 crunches of various sorts, 30 with 10-lb medicine ball

Just started reading John Wright's Why Is That So Funny? A Practical Exploration of Physical Comedy. I suspect that, like Impro, this book may turn out to be life-altering. I certainly hope so.

An extraordinarily stupid article

2008-03-08T17:45:00.003-06:00

I hesitate to legitimize this by giving it more attention than it's due, but it's bothering me too much not to write about it. This week the Washington Post published an appalling article by Charlotte Allen about--really--how stupid women are; how we are prey to our emotions; how silly it is that women have fainted at Obama rallies, but also that Hillary thought she could get away with crying; how we're bad drivers; how the extraordinary women of history such as Elizabeth I are "exceptional outliers"; how we should focus on what we're best at, which is making a house a home.

She bases this not on any in-depth reseach but on her own experience. "Based on her sample of one," commented an astute online reader, "I have to conclude she's correct."

Now, first off, it's shoddy journalism, full of misrepresented statistics, unconfirmed observations, and outdated science. No paper should have published it, let alone the same paper that Katharine Graham used to run.

I could borrow her tactics and use myself as a sample of one. I could report then that in fact women do not watch "Grey's Anatomy" or "Oprah"; that we have not read Eat, Pray, Love; that we happen to do really well at analytical thinking and the arts; that our linguistic abilities are the result of hard work as well as genetic luck; that we also manage to faint when Obama is nowhere in sight, simply by locking our knees on a hot, crowded El train. I'd really love to borrow my sister as the sample: she graduated from the University of Chicago with a 4.0 GPA and--wait for it--a triple major in biology, chemistry, and classics; she studied biophysics at Oxford on a Marshall scholarship; now, on a Hughes scholarship, she's finishing up her PhD in biochem at MIT, where the head of her lab is also female. Yes, Charlotte, clearly we girls should stick to knitting.

But it would be silly to attack her for shoddy reasoning and then resort to the same.

Katha Pollitt actually did look into Allen's sources, and pointed out some of the statistical problems:

Allen claims that the misogynist canard is true: thanks to their superior
visuospatial abilities, men (although maybe not gay men?) are better drivers,
with 5.1 accidents per million miles compared to women's 5.7. "The only good
news,"[Allen] adds, is that because they take fewer risks, women's accidents are
only a third as likely to be fatal. That's a very interesting definition of
ability behind the wheel: the better drivers are the ones who take more risks
and are three times as likely to end up dead.

I have not yet seen a rebuttal that dealt with Allen's unquestioning reliance on IQ as a definition of intelligence. But that's almost as stupid as basing an argument on Freudian psychology. IQ has a well-known bias in favor of white, affluent males. (This should not be terribly surprising, given that the very people defining intelligence have, historically, been white and affluent and male. I take issue with the very idea of logic as the highest form of intelligence; but that's a subject for another essay.) If Allen had used a more contemporary definition of intelligence, such as the Howard Gardner model, she might not have been in such a hurry to give men the edge.

There's been a lot of discussion of hysteria lately, mostly in relation to Hillary's candidacy. While my first instinct is to dismiss it as laughable 19th-century thinking--yes, we ladies do get hysterical, particularly when we have the vapors! But a spot of Dr. Masterson's Patented Nerve Tonic clears it right up!-- it's widespread enough that women my age should probably give it some attention. Let's go straight for the main problem: the idea that emotion is negative, that feeling emotion is weak and showing it is even weaker. Bollocks. That's a standard of male interaction. If the past several thousand years of warfare and repression are any indication, it doesn't seem to be serving the guys all that well. It certainly doesn't seem to be serving Hillary well, and I hope no future female candidates fall into the same trap.

Emotion is not weakness. Emotion opens the doors to empathy--the sort of understanding that makes diplomacy possible. Emotion is the source and strength of our humanity. To say that women in power must shed their emotional sides is to define equality in exactly the way that means equality is still an issue.

Let's take, as a counterexample, the woman who troubles Allen so much: Oprah Winfrey. Oprah has built a damn empire on emotion and empathy. Oprah has so much power that Barack Obama joked that it would be a demotion if she became his VP. And girlfriend cries on TV every week.

Now, I don't watch Oprah's show. And I do sometimes find her demigoddess status creepy. However, as a novelist I surely owe her some gratitude for helping keep literary fiction on the cultural radar. I can't fault her charitable giving. And if women want to choose someone to admire and emulate, I don't see what's so wrong about choosing someone who has managed to become the highest-paid entertainer in the world despite the considerable obstacles of being female, nonwhite, and not shaped like a model. (If you don't think the last one is such a barrier to entry in the entertainment world, take a look at the Actors' Access casting calls for women sometime. If art truly does hold the mirror up to nature, we are a nation of strippers and model-hot girls next door.)

As for the Elizabeth I argument (Allen groups her with Margaret Thatcher, which . . . well, I guess they are both female leaders of England), aren't all really extraordinary people, male and female, "exceptional outliers"? How many Goethes and Galileos and Shakespeares does Allen count among her male acquaintances? The female achievers are, if anything, even more exceptional because of their ability to overcome societal thinking like Allen's. Virginia Woolf already took this argument apart quite thoroughly in A Room of One's Own. It baffles me that a century later anyone should still think it has merit--and that one of the most respected newspapers in the country should give it a home.

At least that home is nice and pretty, I suppose.

Brevity

2008-03-06T22:21:00.002-06:00

Spotted on Lake Shore Drive this evening: a very large Lexus SUV with a vanity plate reading HUBRIS.

I guess after that further comment is superfluous.

Quando la commedia è finnita, or How to Forward Mail

2008-03-03T20:01:00.003-06:00

Grief is exhausting. That is one of its few mercies.

It's probably inescapable that I've been thinking a lot about death these days. A very talented clown friend died unexpectedly in January, and my grandma died the night of Valentine's Day.

Grandma did a lovely thing this winter, as she knew her life was coming to an end. She sent letters she had saved back to the people who had originally sent them to her. So sometime around Thanksgiving I got a letter from my thirteen-year-old self. The handwriting was recognizably mine, even though it was also recognizably younger. More poignant for me was discovering that that writer's relationship to language was also recognizably mine, that the love affair had begun that long ago.

And the letter itself is exuberant. I remember that year--one of the worst in an adolescence that even those who love me describe as difficult--as being almost unremittingly awful. But there it was: written proof that I still knew joy, that I wasn't so far gone that I couldn't occasionally tell other people I loved them.

So in sending me the letter, Grandma somehow managed to give me a slightly better version of myself. Which, of course, is what she'd been doing for me as long as I'd known her.

It wasn't her idea. When she was much younger, she received an old letter of hers from an older relative who was near the end of her life. I don't know whether to wish to be able to prepare for my own death. Maybe it's better for it to be sudden and quick and unexpected. (For the dying. Not so much for the ones they leave behind: Ottavio's death was proof of that.) But if I do wind up being able to prepare, I'll be sending some letters.

Clownfield, or the Saga of the Tire

2008-02-24T17:59:00.002-06:00

I've talked with several other clowns about how, when you really decide to pursue clowning, clown events start to occur in your life with much higher frequency. I call this a clownfield: it feels like you're surrounded by some strange, perverse energy that causes pants to rip and dishes to leap from the shelves. (My friend Nick calls it a mimefield, which is clever but--for me--not so accurate.)

Maybe the clown gods are trying to be benevolent by giving you material (and, clownlike, overdoing it) . Or maybe you have the same amount of strange events you always had, but now you're inclined to notice them more. No one seems to know. In any case, clown happens.

Case in point: The Saga of the Tire.

The roads are horrible in Chicago right now. The winter has been wretched; it's frozen and thawed and frozen and thawed, and the roads are constantly being salted, and so giant moster crater potholes have appeared everywhere. Everyone has had flat tires. But no one has a story like this.

Saturday:
1. Discover flat tire en route to roller derby with Jenn. Take a cab instead. Lose gloves.
Sunday:
2. My boyfriend Joe very kindly puts the spare tire on the car.
Monday:
3. Drive to work and back on spare tire.
4. Drive to Costco Tire Center to have tire fixed.
5. It's not just the tire, it's the rim. Mechanic says, "I'd go to a junkyard. You could also try Pep Boys."
6. Drive to Pep Boys.
7. Pep Boys doesn't have this rim. (They could order something, but it'd be really expensive; they only do glitzy pimp-your-ride rims.)
Tuesday:
8. Call junkyards.
9. Nope.
10. Nope.
11. Nope.
12. Maybe. Steel or chrome? 14" or 15"? All of those are standard.
13. Check car. 14" steel.
14. Call back.
15. Maybe. They'll call me back in about an hour.
16. Wait an hour. Cancel music mixing session.
17. Wait another hour.
18. Call junkyard.
19. Maybe. They'll have to call me back.
20. Wait.
21. Call again.
22. Oooh...yeah, no. That rim's no good.
23. Call more junkyards.
24. Yes! Yes! Yes! I'll be right there...
25. ...except it's on 123rd street, so it may take a while. GoogleMaps says 30 minutes, 45 in traffic.
26. An hour and a half later, at 5:15, pull into the parking lot.
27. Sign #1: OPEN 8-5.
28. Sign #2: YES! WE DELIVER!
29. Resist urge to start kicking and punching things. Drive straight to clown workshop in worsening rain. (The temperature drops from the high 40s to 0 in a matter of hours.)
30. Come out of clown into a blizzard.
31. Drive home from clown.
32. Skid in the snow.
33. Hit a parked car. Leave a note.
Wednesday:
34. Call junkyard from work. Ask them to deliver the rim to the Costco tire center.
35. Call Costco.
36. Costco says, "We don't take deliveries of any kind."
37. Call junkyard to say, "I'll be working at home Friday; maybe you should just deliver the rim there."
38. Junkyard guy says, "I don't deliver to homes."
39. Cry quietly in cubicle.
40. Call Pep Boys and ask if they have any rims, I don't care how they look, I don't care what they cost, that would fit my car.
41. They have one ("in gunmetal"). They will hold it for me until tomorrow morning.
42. Drive like a madwoman from work (n.b.: still on spare tire). Realize I'll actually have time before clown to go to Pep Boys, but just barely.
43. Pep Boys salesguy makes a big show of checking his binder to make sure that rim will actually work on my car.
44. Drive from Pep Boys to clown, with moments to spare.
45. Realize that my ride will now be one-fourth pimped. Everyone at clown loves this idea.
Thursday:
46. Toy with idea of leaving work early to go to Costco before clown.
47. Snow gets very bad and we are all told to leave work early.
48. Three hours and one appalling gas-station restroom visit later (when you're in city limits and the sign says "Restroom outside," isn't it reasonable to assume the restroom won't be a Port-a-Potty? or that its door might shut all the way? or that there will be light inside? and then even if all those things happen not to be true of this particular restroom, that your car won't freeze shut in the time it takes you to pee?), arrive at clown, almost an hour late.
49. End of clown. Drive home very, very slowly in deep snow, through a city that seems weirdly empty.
Friday:
50. Snow is very deep. Work at home all day.
51. Leave snow clogs at Actor's Gym.
Saturday:
52. City still a wreck. No driving. Go to Lecoq workshop (on train) and mixing session (on bus).
Sunday:
53. Drive to Costco tire center.
54. Cell phone rings as I'm shopping: "This rim doesn't fit your car."
55. Try in vain to persuade Costco guys to accept a delivery from the junkyard.
56. Get into car. Have total screaming meltdown in the parking lot.
57. Pull into Pep Boys with cheeks still wet. March up to door with the rim, envisioning pointing at my face and saying "THIS IS YOUR FAULT! YOURS! YOURS!"
58. Door is locked. They are closed. I realize that fixing the tire will take, at a minimum, one more visit each to the junkyard, Costco, and Pep Boys, bringing the totals to junkyard, two; Costco, three; and Pep Boys, four. All on the spare tire, a donut, which has now logged close to 300 miles.
59. It starts to snow again.
Tuesday:
60. Call junkyard. They still have the rim.
61. Drive to junkyard in freakishly little time. The guy is incredibly nice in person and has the rim waiting for me.
62. Drive straight to Costco, where they speedily install the rim and the tire.
63. Drive to Pep Boys for refund, expecting a fight, encountering profuse apologies instead.
64. Cast primary vote, again in record time.
65. Realize I am having a charmed day. Score last-minute appointment at the Aveda Institute and emerge with one of the best haircuts of my life.
Saturday:
66. The tire is flat again.
67. Costco doesn't even know what's wrong with the tire any more. It's still under warranty, though, so they order a replacement...
68. ...and put the spare back on.

An Experiment, Part the First

2008-02-21T21:00:00.000-06:00

Does the world need another blog? Jesus, of course not. I'm starting this because many of my ideas seem to be in essay-ish form lately, but they're casual enough to invite commentary.

And because I hope having this gives me an impetus to polish some of those ideas into something fit for public consumption, much the same way as having a new notebook or a spiffy pen tends to give me a reason to write more.

And because the submit-to-obscure-literary-magazine-and-wait-for-months model of publication is intensely frustrating, and only frustrated writers read obscure literary magazines anyway.

So. The blog strikes me as an interesting combination of the written word and the immediacy of performance. I have no idea where it's going to go. That excites me too.