When in a crisis, look out for someone you can help.

​I am working on listening. 
On asking questions and listening for understanding,
not to teach or show or judge or show contention, show how smart I am.
This listening is difficult and requires attentiveness, energy and effort.
It requires an attitude that wants connection and empathy to build,
even when I have something to say that will mean something right now.
Stepping back and truly observing.

This space is white.

Workshopping How to Hide Your Monster in the Creede, Colorado mountains, the spirals opening up this play during this development process are revealing the guts underneath each character's story. I'm glad I spent a year away from this script. Grateful to be working on it with artists who've never touched it before (the amazing Jeni Mahoney [director], Manuel Zarate [dramaturg] and a brilliant cast), whose questions and observations help me find the core heat inside and trace the strongest throughlines, tracking the outpourings that crack through the floor.

All week we've splayed open the skin to dig out the meat (every time we make that reference in the rehearsal room I imagine Han Solo slicing open the tauntaun to save Luke from hypothermia). In these last days before this version's first public reading (there will be a second in Pagosa Springs on Monday) it's about finessing the edges, sewing up this monster after its surgery to see how it moves with new life. But what else is burrowing inside this play? What other questions are driving me and what other interests, curiosities, visions? The revelation at the end is much bigger now, more Ancient Greek, Sam Shepard in its twisting. What will that unlock, and what questions might that discovery bring?

Such focused time on this play, without having to bother much with other work or responsibilities, or even my normal routine, boy it is a godsend. And this area, remote enough, these San Juan mountain surroundings and the energy here from other playwrights and artists at work... 

I hope you all get a chance to get away soon, to dive into the work that you've been itching to scratch in a magical environment with smart, kind, inspiring people, too. I'm feeling quite lucky to be here now. Thank you Creede and HBMG Foundation!

XOXO, H

We journeyed south and west.
Spent two weeks in California. 
Explored San Francisco art, sport, places, faces.
Camped on Central Coast beaches.
Soaked in ocean, bathed in waterfalls.
Waved hello to sea otters, seals, dolphins, hummingbirds, sunsets.
Stayed with friends in hostel, attic, living room.
Reclaimed a haunted city, transforming rocked memories with lovingkindness.
Reunited with friends, family.
Found clear thinking, renewed tenderness and joy.

​Spent a week back in the normal routine.
And now I'm off again, to the north and west Washington Coast.
To individually and collectively build community.
To transform space through egalitarian teaching and learning.
Puget Sound Workshop Workshop, let's make us grow.

Grateful for all these summer goings.

I've been slow to post these weeks. Erratic on this blog and on social media. 
This is intentional, so I can focus on my work and life with more attention.
Today I head out on a two week adventure with my life-love to California.
San Francisco and the Central Coast.
I plan to be even more erratic in talking about what I'm doing and how I'm doing it.
So I can do (and not do) with more fullness while I'm away.
It's funny, that desire to apologize for not being present everywhere, everywhen.
Available to talk about all the things I'm doing as I'm in process.

But now, as I'm working on a new play, continuing a larger screenplay, co-creating a new performance with Migration Theory and teaching teaching teaching and preparing for a new job where I'll be teaching teaching teaching, all my social media activity, including this process blog, is getting in the way of my process.

I'm not pulling out completely from everything internet (except over these next two weeks), but now and come future I'm allowing myself to be more sporadic. And I'm all the happier for it. More productive, balanced and sustainable. 

I look forward to sharing with you what's happening (and how and why I'm doing what I'm doing) when it feels relevant to my work and life. When it feels helpful to me and maybe to you. I will likely find more of an Anne Bogart blog posting schedule than an Austin Kleon newsletter schedule. 

Thanks for understanding, for reading, for being, for doing what you do best. 
Whatever that best may be for you, keep doing it in the way that suits you best. 
With kindness and gratitude at the heart of it all, perhaps.

Which is what I want to send you.

All my gratitude,

H

Productivity ignites again. 
Lots of healing, lots of waiting, lots of stillness.
Leads to this time undergoing big projects, entering into lots of teaching.
More active, more energized.
Paying attention to where my curiosities are taking me. 
I go at my work much easier than I used to.
Less choking.
More inviting.
Following the impulse, writing what my characters are asking to say.
Sharing my interests, listening to what young artists and students want to learn.
Challenging myself, each other.
Approaching big risk, change, new steps.
Outside my comfort zone.
What my body mind has been pining after. 
And so here I go. Another step by step.

Here are some things in old notebooks I'm finding and listening to,
And how I'm thinking about seeing and being seen:

"The seeds you water are the seeds you grow." Buddhist saying

And so what am I watering?

"What we see in an artist's work is what they attend to." Anne Bluethenthal

And so what am I attending to?

"In the end it all comes down to this: you have a choice (or more accurately a rolling tangle of choices) between giving your work your best shot and risking that it will not make you happy, or not giving it your best shot -- and thereby guaranteeing it will not make you happy. It becomes a choice between certainty and uncertainty. And curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice." David Bayles/Ted Orland

And so what am I choosing?

"I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices." Audre Lorde

How do we care for the other?
How do I care for the other in me?
So I can care for the other in you?

By investing in this kind of art making?

Art that is of the people, by the people, for the people.

And always asking...

Who is onstage -- who is in power?
How do we see work? How is work being seen?
How do we define ourselves so we have some kind of control over the lens we're being viewed through?

​And remembering when I did this, a great practice: 

Step back from my work over time and look at it.
The last ten works, are there linkages? Consistencies?

It might be time for me to revisit this again now.

And you? What are you working on?
What are you asking?
​What are you following?
What are your eyes following? All your senses?

How can I tell story using only sound? Only music? Movement?
Using only space? Visual art? The environment? Textiles?
What stories need to be expressed through those limits? Right now?
How am I limited right now? How are you? Physically, mentally, spatially (and&and)?
What's the interrogation/aesthetic/narrative/inquiry/mapping of those boundaries?
Of those differences? Of those spaces between opposites?

"Nothing is a mistake." Merce Cunningham

"Art is a process and a journey. All artists have to find ways to lie to themselves, find ways to fool themselves into believing that what they're doing is good enough, the best they can do at that moment, and that's okay. Every work of art falls short of what the artist envisioned. It is precisely that gap between their intention and their execution that opens up the door for the next work." Eric Fischl

"You cannot go into the womb to form the child; it is there and makes itself and comes forth whole... Of course you have a little more control over your writing than that, but let it take you and if it seems to take you off the track don't hold back." Gertrude Stein

"Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them." Albert Einstein

"A play begins when something goes wrong, when the pendulum swings to wildly and an individual or a family or a society is thrown into a compromised state of imbalance. The world of a play is off-kilter. The story is generally the dramatization of an off-kilter world being brought back to some kind of stability." Anne Bogart

What are you investigating right now?
What are you researching?
What reminders from your heroes/mentors/giants are helping your journey?

This is my second time through physical therapy. The first was also for ankle trouble, after consecutive major sprains in the right. Then I was much younger, in early adolescence, and enjoyed the attention my injury granted me.

That first day in therapy, I found Stephen King's personal acronym for P.T. (pain and torture) apt. I found the practitioner cold and irritable, didn't like the hurt, wanted to get at least a little coddled, and got lazy with at-home exercises. Our sessions lasted a short while and didn't get me very far. I wouldn't be surprised if I quit before we could make progress. 

This time around, my left ankle -- which had always been my trusty and true appendage of strength -- is undergoing a longer process, which I hope will get me back to my usual levels of speed, strength and dexterity within my six weeks of prescribed therapy.

Going deeper into these sessions, I'm seeing that this time of healing through effort shares similarities with the creative process. What I put in, I get out. The more I attend to the rigorous and painful work at home and at the P.T. office, the more mobile I get. At the same time, I have to listen to my body -- in terms of pain, weakness and exhaustion -- and use that as a meter for when to slow down or stop my assigned exercises. 

​​As an artist and writer, I have to deal with tough stuff, too. Emotions and thoughts and fears, examining traumas of mine and the world, and going into the heavy, durational work of inquiring into what is unseen. I've practice every day, and sometimes pushing and pulling ideas, materials and curiosities gets wearing. Sometimes it hurts a great deal. I have to listen to my body/mind/heart/spirit, and not damage myself as I create, sending me back into overworking, obsessive or self-destructive habits brought about from panic, anger, depression, grief or mental instability.

On the other hand, I can't coddle myself either. When I find my limits and break past my comfort zone, I find progress, joy, breakthroughs. Idle, I weaken and, if left in a creative stupor, am likely to break down and fall apart. Overdoing (over-scheduling, making too many things at once, swimming too far into traumatic territory I'm not yet prepared to traverse) can leave me broken as well. So I listen, work my muscles into that "hurts so good" vulnerability place, push further and seduce my body/mind into more courageous, complex and risky lands.

​There is a difference between the discomfort zone -- where the magic happens -- and the unproductive alarm zone, which can snap a person backwards.

This time, I appreciate my physical therapist. I don't think he's a jerk or insensitive. He pushes me to healing through daily effort. Maybe this practitioner is better at connecting with me than the last, but more so I think I'm better at understanding the physical demands ahead -- and the purpose for the strain. I don't need to glorify my pain or do less to remain injured because it makes me feel special -- I don't find joy in that kind of special anymore. I'd rather be able to walk, run, dance, swim, bike, hike, stretch and train with ease again.

My creative process is better, too. In my pre-teen years, I might write a poem or a story when I got an idea or an assignment. In my teen years, emotional undoing and mental breakdowns became additional reasons to make a thing. But otherwise I let my heart and make muscles go languid as my physical rehabilitation commitment, and my dedication to mental health care. 

Now the daily practice of art and writing readies me to challenge my work/life habits, delve into new ways of creating and widen my periscope to the world, larger with each project. As a topic troubles or terrifies me, I plunge in further, but also listen, attend to self-care and step back now and then. So may my daily rehabilitation practice make me more present in my body. 

I'm in the collecting phase of creating. The waiting phase. The wandering.

(reading Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost lets me wander in stillness)

Also the healing phase. Physical therapy. Regaining mobility through much trial.

And the internal riot phase, as national news steams my precious bodily fluids.

I wonder how the recent healthcare news will affect what I collect, how I connect it, how I share what becomes of my connected collections. 

(I love that 3-part distillation* of the creative process learned from Amanda Palmer**)

(*collect, connect, share -- find out more by reading her The Art of Asking)

(**who has a new album forthcoming)

As I collect, I find:

​A few memory words from a 2015 version of me, as I continue to figure out who I am and what I'm making:

Always this balancing act. Refining the dream. Not everything is going to be perfect, nothing is going to be. But I'm cracking at it. Trying to stay focused. On the dream.

And questions to help me (you?) refine what I'm collecting, connecting, sharing, from a 2015 Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts class with professor Anne Bluethenthal.

What is the topic?
What is the question?
What is the material?
What is the vocabulary?
What is the way we enter in?

And so begin.

Continue to begin. And begin. And begin.

Begin to discover this world, and you, through what you're creating. 

And one final memory quote:

"For a work of art to be good, it has to show the artist." Orson Welles

And so we continue to make and question and show and reify the universe.

Enjoy your current moon/mood/making phase.
Or if not enjoy, sit, notice, see it with a curious toddler's eyes.
Try to avoid judgement. Wherever you are is where you are and right for right now.

XOXO, H

Two sets of gems from Anne Bogart's A Director Prepares: 

First: Key words from each chapter on these seven aspects of art: (memory, violence, eroticism, terror, stereotype, embarrassment and resistance). 

Then, ten fabulous reminders.

I was grateful to rediscover these entrances into creating new work when going through notes from a Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts class in 2015, my second trip through Bogart's fabulous book of Seven Essays on Art and Theatre. I hope they offer something to you as well. 

First, Seven Aspects of Art:

I. Memory

remember                    deepening                    history/her-story                
                   ancestors                           accessing                            perceiving
   go back                   contextualizing                improvisation                    make alive again

II. Violence

        commitment                                  keep it                       restrictions                
risk                          resurrect the dead                articulate                       cruel decisiveness
           construct                                       exactness                   freedom
    act                   choose death                                repetition                 allow failure

III. Eroticism

invite                off-balance                  disorient               adventure                  desire
           tension                       restraint                   moving                    sensation
   awe                 attention                    curiosity                 experience                 interest

IV. Terror

                fear vs. safety                                        awake                         penetration into life
disorient                        uncontrollable chaos             not knowing

V. Stereotype

fire under cliche                          inherited shapes                  repetition
                               push through                               solidarity                     limits
transformation                                embodiment                     container

VI. Embarrassment

                                        get out of own way                       obstruction                        
letting go of authority                                     vulnerability                    listening as teacher
                                       half shame/half glory                        personal
assumption = sleep                                             revelation                       intimate
                                              lie tells truth

VII. Resistance

overcome                                                    always there                                             struggle    
                obstacle => challenge => wow                       expression --> expression
                                                                       reframe: