Reading Phase

There's a phrase often used by Anne Bogart, Barney O'Hanlon and other SITI Company members during Viewpoints workshops: Do more reading than writing.

More reading than writing is an important improvisation tool -- use what's already in the room. It's an important creative tool -- I believe art has less to do with inventing something new than observing, collecting and curiously exploring the world around us, and then feeding back each artist's personal interpretation of that assembled information. 

Right now, reading more than writing is an important tool for me as I'm reflecting on these intensive last two years, and absorbing inspiration for new projects. 

After graduating from CIIS less than three weeks ago, I've been reading through:

• travels across California, Oregon and Washington (San Francisco, Redding, Ashland, Yachats, Portland, Seattle, Long Beach and Pendleton before making it home to Boise) 
• long conversations with family, friends and my best-love-person 
• seeing live music in brand new places
• seeing live variety show performances inspired by a web series devoted to comic books
• the very new experience for me of going to major league baseball games
• driving up Mt. Shasta
• walking the ocean in three states (and into ocean in two states)
• figuring out how to play the ukulele
• poring through art books at the library
• practicing Alexander Technique
• actually reading, in a book sense -- plays I've never yet touched, articles from The Dramatist, Conversations with Anne (a fantastic book of interviews by Anne Bogart) and the beautifully weird Utopian Russian novel WE by Eugene Zamiatin

A wonderful lounge restaurant in Ashland, OR, featuring regular music (recently including Thomas Paul and Bart Budwig & his Amperband), great food, drinks, service and a lovely name. Also called The Public.

​Yes I've been writing too, tackling personal and administrative tasks that have gone on the wayside, teaching a smidgen and working on small projects, but I feel my current job is to keep reading in this strange time between regular school+work and regular work+resuming big projects. In doing so, I'm getting my energy back and my enthusiasm.

Yes, it's an odd feeling not to be constantly moving, either from task to task or place to place, and to be releasing the familiar panic that's become my consistent anatomy since late 2013. The extra space is unsettling. And it's good for me. Like I read in The Oatmeal's recent post, right now, I'm rebuilding me (and my love for art making) by breathing more in than out.

Though this slowing time feels foreign, where I'm still working but on my own schedule, not driven by intensive daily deadlines, I'm asking myself to enjoy it and be in it. In a couple weeks, my schedule will normalize more through teaching Idaho Writing Camps, summer work that I love so much, as I push deeper into new play projects. I'd better let myself really breathe and read while I have the chance.
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​How about you? How do you breathe in? What are you reading? What phase in the creative process or human process are you in right now (reading, dialogue, writing, sharing, reflecting, all of the above, other)?