Days Six to Ten, the Draffin Workshop

Draffin's work is philosophically so similar to what I am and what I do, it is like swimming in my own colour. The way he works with movement, Contact improv, tai chi, chorus work, voice, meditation… all stuff that I naturally gravitate across in both movement and performance.

The past week has felt like one long meditation; swimming laps back and forth in cool water.
Where are the boundaries of myself? It is not so easy, sometimes to tell.
70% water swimming in cool water. My sense of self come from my motion.



The first real friction came, oddly enough, from the Chinese text.

望落城下街道
人群忙係何事

I have been swimming in 土瓜灣 recently. Upstream many mornings, up 太子道西.
And then downstream, rapidly, by minibus after class.

黑色隊伍
走向墳墓 走向火 焱
迪比斯係一個葬禮
迪比斯比一堆堆嘅死屍嗆着喉嚨

The words taste unfamiliar in my mouth. 迪比斯. 隊伍.
The Oedipus script is an odd mix of Cantonese and more formal Chinese. Later, when I get my hands on the English original (by Ted Hughes, who did his own adaptation from Senaca's Latin) I find the rendering too literal, too long. So I spent Friday night re-rendering the original in Cantonese, trying to get the conciseness and rhythm of the text. Heifer. 小母牛. Too many syllables. So I sacrifice the 小 and keep the 母牛.
I truncate 就好似一個載滿汚油嘅袋 to 似袋污油.
The best way to learn lines is to write your own translation!

讀到關于死屍腐爛，先臭覺腐爛的臭味, 然後想起一行禪師 (Thich Nhat Hanh) 的 Flowers and garbage:

Defiled or immaculate. Dirty or pure. These are concepts we form in our mind. A beautiful rose we have just cut and placed in our vase is pure. It smells so good and fresh. A garbage can is the opposite. It smells horrible, and is full of rotten things. But that is only when we look on the surface. If we look more deeply we shall see that in five or six days, the rose will become part of the garbage. We do not need to wait five days to see it. If we just look at the rose, and we look deeply, we can see it now. And if we look into the garbage can, we can see that in a few months its contents will be transformed into lovely vegetables, and even a rose… Roses and garbage inter-are. Without a rose we cannot have garbage; and without garbage, we cannot have a rose. They need each other very much.

-- from Peace is Every Step, Thich Nhat Hanh

Wednesday I was chi-empty. We had been singing, and I had been projecting 自己內氣。This sort of work circulates a lot of chi – I can tell by the cool sweat the springs to my palms and feet . And from hands-on healing, I knew that I had been projecting my own chi, inside of tapping into the universal source. I felt so depleted, I didn't want to talk to anyone. "Let's not talk today," I mummured mentally to Victor. "I just want to do. I can do tai chi, but not talk." 太極、上課、太極。一天走三場都算多。

Thursday I was emotionally tired. We'd finished with storytelling; and the final image was the retelling "the death of a child." My vocal cords were a bit raw after that. I am not used to living such strong emotions, it's going to take some practice before I can turn them on and off more easily.

Today, Sunday, I take some rest.
I need to rest my body – I pulled my groin muscle lightly. Of all things!
Meanwhile, I enjoy the huge winds. Mid-autumn is just around the corner.

Day Five, the Draffin workshop

One thing that I am realising – something that is being highlighted by the Draffin workshop – is the extent at which I am terrified of having nothing to show for my (our) work in January. That’s why I push so much, I think. I want to be certain. I want to be safe. I want it to work.

To yet, the responsibility of a director involves clear decisions – actors neither want nor respect a director who doesn’t know what they are doing. And so I find myself in somewhat of a contradiction – feeling the imperative to be in a certain place by a certain time; and terrified by the prospect that I will not be.

We have been working a lot with “trusting the moment”.. trusting something will emerge… because life naturally has a rhythm – we only have to listen. And this rhythm is naturally dramatic – mind is naturally polar; if we stay at one place for a while, it gets restless, and something else is born. So the trick is not so much creating new material, but to follow the shifts in the unfolding.

“Do less, experience more…”

Part of the trap is when I think I have a certain degree of competence, and I want to prove it to the world. “Look how good I am! Look! Look!” I want so much to prove my worth, that I stray from what is authentic.

And so, ironically, I get particularly tense at places where I know I can create something good. Contact improv being one of them.

Let go… and listen…

Yes, I’m finding it difficult to need to pitch the piece to actors, when I don’t really have anything in my hands. Before I can get them to trust me, I need to trust myself. I need to trust that something interesting can come out of the Concrete Jungle. There is something, I know…

Well, basically I need to trust. I think that’s pretty much the bottom line. Trust… to trust my creativity…

Day One, the Draffin workshop

Wow. I'm physically exhausted.
Not so much actually from the workshop itself, but from the Contact improv performance plus the six hour workshop, plus tai chi in the evening. So it's been a full day of moving.

On the bus to Cattle Depot I was thinking: it's pretty incredible to think that for the next month I will be back at school, 7 hours a day. I am really not in that space yet. And then I feel asleep on the 75X.

What was meant to be a transition week between all that intensive summer teaching and the month long physical theatre intensive turned out to be a busy week. A week where I managed somehow to sleep less than my busy summer. I was on creative juice; brainstorming, leaping, flinging e-mails back and forth cyberspace with Dan Finkel in preparation for our January performance... tentatively entitled Concrete Jungle... a name that took us all week to brainstorm. A two paragraph blurb that took us a couple of days to write:

Concrete Jungle is a piece for seven people on the absurdity of city life. It chorus – whose role in ancient Greek theatre was to witness, forewarn, and give voice to the populace - somehow manage to endure the rush hour crowds, hazy office hours, cut-throat deadlines to let their imaginations run berserk in the city.

Devastatingly observant, comically insane, and rampant with emotion, Concrete Jungle is a dance-theatre piece that celebrates our ability to be creative and courageous in an efficient world.

* * *

It's been a tough week. One of those weeks where I think, Why on earth am I even in the performing arts? Does it really make me a better person?

It's just been a week of let downs:
(a) Despite all that proposal writing with the slender hope that Jacqueline could persuade her boss at the Fringe, it came to no avail. The Fringe is still reserving the place for its festival, and we are still venue-less for the show.

(b) Having the five person section I was responsible for turn out to be somewhat disastrous... partly yes, it is my fault, for not making clear that I really wanted to be facilitator, not director; but also just hurt by the lack of respect performers have for a piece of work... that people feel that it's ok to cancel without warning or show up half an hour late without apology.

(c) A dissatisfaction with my own performance on Sunday
Overarticulated. Too adrenaline-pumped by an audience. I can sense how tense my neck was during the video. Was seduced by the camera clicking away. The scary thing is, it felt ok during the performance; I felt that there was a clear connection between me and 文偉. So the connection and feelings were real, but the form that came out was a bit elaborated.

(Incidentally, the rehearsal period with 文偉 was lovely. Just felt like we worked hard and I couldn't deliver in the 尾聲.)

* * *

On the bus to Cattle Depot I think.. I am tired of fighting.
I have been pushing too hard this week. I need to step back and listen. To take in the space. To take in the reactions of my partner.
I know how to do it... but sometimes, I don't. So I have to check it, and re-connect.

So it was with these feelings and aching muscles that I went into the Draffin workshop. And the first thing we did as a group was to clean the studio. What a lovely ritual.

There is not yet anything devastatingly new in what we have been doing in the workshop, but what is important, I think, is actually a return for me to the grounding basics or theatre presence and listening. We did a lot of stamping, some walking meditation, some 聽勁...

Draffin didn't let me get away with my mopeyness and weariness either. He gave everyone in the workshop individual feedback on the listening/following judo 聽勁.. where he asked me, "Are you strong?"
"Um," I said, unready for this question.
"Are you strong?"
"Um. It's relative, I guess."
No, he wouldn't let me get away with that. In fact, near the end of the day he picked on me.
It's nice to know that there is someone who doesn't let you get away with stuff like that. But god, I am tired. Physically today. Mentally, emotionally I am ok now. But physically - wow. I am knackered.

This workshop is very good for me, in the sense that it directly addresses my work, not as a director, not as an arts administrator, but as a performer. "Theatre is about human beings" says Draffin... and yes, the performer is the line of contact. The director is only a guide. And that's why I got into theatre - because I do believe there is something very powerful about live performance, and is not reproducible in other mediums. And so it's good that I get back in touch with my capacity for this.

Well, here we are. It's 6:32am... and it's another brand new day ahead of me. Back to work. Time to get on the minibus... clean the studio...

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links: Robert Draffin workshop with On and On Theatre