(I meant to post this last Friday but that didn't work out. It's been that busy lately. I'm just going to try and get this posted. Check back later for links.)
So Spring arrived this last week, and in Nebraska it ironically (or perhaps not so ironically) brought two days off from school because of snow as a love offering to the youth. Sunday night had much anxious watching of the 10 o'clock evening news. Faces half lit from the flicker of the T.V., the only light in the room, eyes glued to the little ticker at the bottom of the screen rolling over the names of all snow closings in alphabetical order. And when the long awaited name was finally displayed, there was much rejoicing.
That is, until I put a shovel in their hand the next morning.
But they were a good help and got some color into their cheeks. Eighteen inches and then only days later it was entirely gone again. That's the Midwest for you.
This week is one of those weeks where pretty much the only thing I get to do at home is sleep. And it's gotten to the point that I have to conscientiously schedule that. I'm blocking off time in my schedule so I can sleep. When am I going to sleep? I've got to block that out so I can get seven or eight hours. And even that didn't always happen.
Part of the schedule craziness is due to the Arts Festival that my daughter is going to this weekend. I'm helping out as a parent sponsor for the trip three hours west to central Nebraska. It's a state wide festival---something that they do every year. In preparation I've also been playing director of sorts.
This festival is a bit of a competition. Not the first, second, third kind of competition, but one where you are given a quality rating and then they award a special recognition to the one entry in each category that the judges feel is of particular merit.
I have had kind of a love/hate relationship with the whole concept of any kind of "arts" competition for years. I realize the upside---that it creates excitement, gives the kids something to work for, brings people together for an event that allows them to meet people they otherwise may never have met. But I'm always constantly aware of how impossible it is to measure anything artistic in an objective way. Certianly there are technique elements that can be judged, but overall it's a gut level "what did the judges like best" subjective award. And it's an impossible thing to prepare for. How do you read the minds of people you've never met to figure out what they will respond to and put that up against performances you've never seen.
To me competitive art is like lining up an orange, and cabbage and a bag of peanuts and saying "which one wins". Wins based on what? And if one wins does that make it better than the others? And when you are working with people investing themselves in delivering the highest quality they can, it's hard to escape the disappointment that inevitably follows if they don't take top honors. There is always that lingering "what did we do wrong" in the back of the mind that deflates the experience just a little, no matter how brave a face you put on it.
I try and prepare anyone I work with to set the goal properly on the creation and the experience. I try to do it ahead of time so it won't just seem like justification and spin after the fact. But it's never 100% effective.
A few years back I set out on a little mind quest. I wanted to define ART. What is art---what makes it art. I know this is the unanswered question of all time, but I had the Internet so I figured that maybe I could get a little closer than I had been. Right away I found that this is a troubling questions precisely because it is the nature of the beast to defy any definition applied to it. If you say "this is not art because. . .", Art and artists will find a way to make art exactly that. It becomes art almost precisely because of it's defiance.
What I started to feel is that art is defined by the influential art elite at any given time. Get a group around and call something art, and it will become destined to argue for it's own legitimacy. So it began to seem that consensus was the ultimate definition for art. After viewing ART21 on PBS where there were even things that were sort of "conceptual art"---and idea that was defined and executed, but not in a way that it would ever be seen or touched by any audience except in description (which makes you want to utter the forbidden phrase "That's Art?"), and I began to be convinced that this was the case. Art is art when some one says so, and another someone agrees.
But I just felt like there was more than that. I love art. I love that almost spiritual feeling, that drawing out from my core when I visit a museum, or see a film, read a book, hear a piece of music, see a dance, watch a play that pushes and pulls on me. I love creating. It is more than rules, more than some sort of conspiracy of the soul. It was essence.
Marilyn reminded me of this journey when I read a Maldelyn L'Engle quote on her blog. It read "Remembering all of the lovely things we have forgotten is one of the reasons for all art." And I was drawn back into what I finally concluded from my search.
I read a book on one of the art forms that pushes some of the outer limits of the art world, Performance Art. In it, one passage described a group who organized an event where and audience was invited into an improvised storefront theater space and once inside, they were seated in bleacher style seating in front of a curtain. Then, at the designated moment, the curtains were pulled aside revealing---a large window allowing the audience to look out onto the street they'd just entered from.
I'm sure there was more than one person in the audience that thought, "Is this some kind of a joke"? But the lucky ones sitting there would have realized what had just happened. That the presenters had placed the viewers in a perspective that said "look closer", "see what you hadn't seen before", "experience it in a new way, in a fresh way". The curtain 'frame' said, "this is important, don't miss it". The frame was a pointer for reflection.
So that's when I came to the conclusion that it's the frame that makes the art. Which explains why it's costs 2 or 3 times the amount you paid for the painting to get it framed. It can be a literal frame or a figurative one, but it seems to me that the artist always creates a framed context that sets their creation aside and invites reflection and draws us out of our glossed over existence. Their creation make fresh and allows us to breath a first breath again. Not an exhaustive definition, I know, but one that works for me.
And I love finding art creating connection across the expanse of space on the Internet. Through photos, blogs, vlogs, and podcasts (among other undefinable sites and perhaps even the Internet itself), I have been transported at the most unlikely of times. Often when I wasn't even looking for it. What a wonderful zone for releasing the creative spark on humanity. That to me is the most compelling reason to bridge the digital divide. To provide a portal into this virtual space for those currently condemned to living only in concrete reality. This, to me, seems more important than doing so to allow the deprived to shop on-line, or gain access to more information. I feel like there is a strong need to allow anyone and everyone into this connection to ourselves so it is not a domain exclusive to anyone.
Something else that happened this week is that I discovered that a classmate that I went to grad school with has "broken through". It's arguable that he broke through some time ago. We had been seeing him on some national commercials for a while. It became a game with our family---"Tony spotting". If you saw him in a new commercial you would shout to everyone in the house and they would come running. He was in a Velveta cheese commercial unintentionally playing charades, and doing the Roboto in a VW in an empty parking lot. We we sure he'd have a T.V. series before to long, like the chick from Felicity who made the jump from feminine protection to evening drama star. And so it was. If you are a fan of the show "Arrested Development" you'd know him as the goofy little brother still living at home, or something like that. He's the one that got to kiss Liza Minnelli. His full name is Tony Hale.
This year he's in three major motion picture releases. Three. In one year. Guess he's not too worried about his show's cancellation. The first one many not impress to many people---Larry the Cable Guy. But it is a start in the movies. Next month he has a film coming out called R.V.---starring Robin Williams. Robin Williams, for crying out loud. This film isn't not supposed to be any sort of Oscar contender either, but come on, Robin Williams. I'd take a roll as an extra in a training video with Robin Williams.
The next is in November called "Stranger than Fiction", where he is working with a cast that includes Queen Latifah, Will Ferrell, Dustin Hoffman, and Emma Thompson (whom I would even be overwhelmed to hold the microphone for while she recorded phone prompt messages). Looks like he's got a good agent so this will probably be an upward trend that will have much for me to chart over the coming years.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. The last thing I did with him was to have him as the lead opposite of my wife in a children's show I wrote and directed for my final project in grad school. Now there's this part of me that says "what happened---look at where you are, and look at where he is---what happened, dude!". But I don't feel that pang to sharply because, thankfully, there is another part of me that realizes that I'm so very happy to be a husband and a father and just be right exactly where I am.
One nice thing---it's puts me a good couple notches higher on the Kevin Bacon game. I'm at the third degree now! (And you're at the forth. Only six degrees. The whole world. It's so true.)
However, I do have that thing down deep inside of me that can't help but want to create. I come up with ideas all day, and even sometimes when I'm dreaming. I solve creative problems that aren't even my own for people I'll never meet. It's this crazy compulsion that is just always lurking in the back of my mind. The frustrating thing is that this is currently coupled with a psychological scarring from several years of brutalizing myself in all aspects of theater. I pushed myself too hard, expected too much of myself, and judged myself harshly until, now, when I even begin to try to bring something I conceive to fruition, the life immediately drains entirely from the very core of my psyche. I feel almost instantly shelled before I even begin.
It's so frustrating.
Which brings me back to my involvement this weekend. I'm helping direct what's called a Human Video. Basicly this is a lip sync story pantomime---dance for the non-dancer, acting for the non-actor to pre-recorded music. And of course my years of training (not to mention the thousands of dollars that education cost) recoil at the thought of this non-art. Pompus I know. And the penance for my aesthetically pious, "artier-than-thou" attitude is that here I am directing it.
It started as a favor to help with the youth club that my daughter is involved in. But I'm discovering that there is potentially more to it than that. This silly little performance style has almost a tribal/cottage art feel to it somehow. Nothing that the art establishment would spare time for, but there is a sort of primitive impulse being given wings here. It's creating something out of nothing. A collaboration from the heart of these kids that seeks to connect with an audience. It's like someone discovered what was going on in the bedrooms of preteen-age girls everywhere singing into their hair brushes (and guys even if they wouldn't admit it), and brought it out into the light.
And now I'm in it. I am finding that what I bring to the table is appreciated. I am able to offer some new ideas that expand their existing symbolic vocabulary a little. And we make discoveries together through guided improvisation. It's still fairly rudimentary in execution (I'm no dance teacher and this isn't ballet class), but it's growing and becoming something a little larger.
I'm finding that it gives me a little room for discovery, too. So many projects that I could launch out on seem so much bigger than me at the moment. Directing a play, writing fiction, creating video or art. Like I said, right now it exhausts me even to think about it. When I have undertaken these type of projects recently, they have depleted me entirely. They didn't bring life, they took it. And that can't be what art is about.
But these simple little mini-plays are giving me a chance to work on a small scale. Have little victories, like a rehab for the creativity of the spirit. A sketch book for the stage. I don't know in the end if these efforts will have meaning for anyone else but me, but I hope so. I have no delusions of grandure, but I have experienced fleeting moments when I was able to step "out of time" again like only happens when one is so immersed in creating that the outside world ceases to exist.
I'm moving past worrying about being judged. It's becoming so hard in our culture, when increased polarization means that more and more people feel that the speck in their brother's eye gives justification to beat that brother with the log in their own. That's something I feel very caught in the middle of many times. I have to be careful to listen and not judge. And not judge the judgmental. Curb my knee jerk devils advocate reaction. And yet still try to coax more people into looking past what they don't understand, or disagree with, or find unpleasant or not pleasurable or of questionable merit.
I hope I can invite more people to rethink the frame. The frame can be lavish and gold, or it can be refrigerator magnets. It can be leather bound or spiral. It can be on a grand stage with expensive tickets, or it can be on basement carpet or backyard grass. But when it comes from the soul, it deserves attention and respect. It deserves a moment. And in that moment, a person may be changed.
