Monday Musing, 12/10/18

Hello Apprentices--
​
One of the strengths of our particular art form is that even though there is a final “product” that we share with the public, our “process” never ends.

Unlike, say, a novel, or a painting, or a film, which are by their very natures static (though our understanding of and appreciation for them can evolve), theatre is live. It is kinetic. It requires a new micro process at every performance, even after the macro process of rehearsal “culminates” at opening.

Your performance is never “done”.

And any particular individual patron can never have precisely the same experience again, even if they come back the very next night. 

​This is not to say that writers, or painters, or filmmakers do not also have their process, but their processes result in a tangible finished THING. Is the THING the art, or is the reader’s/viewer’s/watcher’s experience of that thing the art? That’s a fun and baffling idea to contemplate, but regardless, that THING resides in a space BETWEEN the artist and the patron. Whereas the THING that is theatre can only reside in the space SHARED by the artist and the patron.

I do not compare to say one art is better than another. I compare to remind you that being a theatre artist means you must be present and vulnerable in terrifying ways. And that particular terror can make it easy to put things off. To procrastinate. To withhold. To self-censor.

To counteract that terror, I offer you two cookies this week. First... Batman. Batman will make you brave.

Second, this awesome quote from the fabulous feminist humorist Cynthia Heimel:  “There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell? Leap.”​

Leap. Like Batman off a building.