One of the head honchos (well, honchas, as she's a woman?) of my Master's program gave us all a good talking-to a few weeks ago, telling us that, as artists, we need to pay attention to what our Zen Questions are. Those things that get in your head, eat away your brain, and threaten to turn you into a Shaun of the Dead SAG extra until you payattentiontothemnowplease. You know, those. We all have them, and I've been devoting most of my non-art-making, wine drinking, idle-facebooking, Golden Girl watching time this week trying to identify mine. I thought I'd share -- for me, I don't phrase them as questions, but just leave them mostly as thins. I'll call 'em my Zen Nuggets (like McNuggets, only made of non-petrochemical waste). Here, in no particular order, is:
THAT GIRL INTERNATIONAL'S HAPPY MEAL OF ZEN (TM):
1. Slang/Cursewords: I love non-ways of saying something. Instead of telling someone that they're speaking un-informedly, I'd far rather tell him (usually a him, I admit) that he's being a fucking smartypants. I can't help it. It gets to the point, and is a far more accurate indicator of both my mood (generally cranky) and the degree to which I feel it. Also, I love the mutability of the English language. I love that way that random words strung together acquire a sort of hidden meaning through the use of slang. My favorites of the slang and swear varieties (including the aforementioned F-word -- sorry, Mom, but it's true) include: navel-gazing, can't be arsed (not ass, an important distinction), liar liar pants on fire, gold-star gay, BALLS! (my favorite expression of ultimate displeasure), in like a lion out like a lamb, hole in the wall, and tightie-whities. I also include, more out of embarrasment than glee, my propensity for talking about my PANTS here in London. Pants of course in London meaning my underwear, not the cute jeans I just bought on sale at T.K. Maxx... those are apparently trousers. Balls.
2. Shakespeare: Haters, check your attitudes at the door. As, currently, I'm working as a live artist and devised theatre-maker, it is uncool to admit a passion for iambic pentameter and to be able to pick an anapest out of a line-up (which I can - oh snap). But I can't help but but bow before the genius of the language, and revel in the freedom that heightened language gives to an artist. I've got a whole mess of monologues and innumerable fragments floating around in my head, and I think of some part of them everyday. They've become a part of me, starting from when my Dad would read me A Midsummer Night's Dream as a bedtime story. I will never be done with the Bard.
3. Argentine Tango: Yeah I know. Looking at me, with my 5'2," chubby, short-waisted frame, you'd immediately assume that I've been around the milonga a time or two. But humor me. Something about the freedom that the dance finds in the extreme restrictions of the dance, namely a frame which requires the follow to physically lean into the lead's chest, is intoxicating to me. When I first experienced it as a dancer, I wasn't sure what to expect. I was a bit apprehensive about a dance invented for a pimp to show to off his whore. But then I checked my hesitation at the door (see, more slang!) and just went with it. The music and the dance speak volumes to me about sexuality, gender, power and masquerade; these concepts are the foundations of nearly all of my work, consciously or not. My Astor Piazzola playlist is the most played on my iPod, mostly put down to when I'm working in the studio.
4. Why do I remember that?: Really a foundational question for me. I'm almost haunted by wanting to know how memory WORKS. Why can't I remember the bliss of a good kiss in December for example, but instead, I remember, in great detail, falling down the front steps of the Political Science building at my undergraduate college, painfully skinning both knees? How does my body choose what becomes long-term memory? How reliable is my memory? How much am I "faking it" just to make the story better/easier/kinder, etc. The questions keep on coming.... I also think a lot about things like Alzheimer's and dementia, as I've had some family experience with them. It's a sick kind of fascination, I suppose, but it's there nonetheless.
5. Down to come up: I had a dance teacher and general life mentor in college who used this phrase a lot. Usually, she meant it in a technical way. If you're going to jump into the air, you'll go higher if you really push into the floor, gathering your momentum by pushing your feet into the floor. That sort of thing. But I hear this phrase in my head a lot, in relation to emotional state as well. I do tend to see experience as cyclical, the "high" of one experience growing out of the "low" of another and so on. I think about it a lot, and it seems to keep recurring for me in my artistic practice. So thank you, Jan Hyatt. For this, and so many things.
6. Nonliving "Actors" Onstage: I'm quite taken with Julie Taymor's early non-Spiderman work (like her stage version of The Tempest, in which she uses puppets in truly evocative and innovative ways. In that play, for example, Ariel is represented by the right hand of the actress who speaks her lines, and manages to convey a whole character with a palm and five little flexible digits. I'm very fascinated by the role that "animated objects" can play onstage, and by the capacity for interplay that these lifeless things hold. I'm exploring this constantly, as it seems, even when I consciously try not to. Which seems like a sign that I should NOT try not to, but just embrace it.
7. Einstein's Dreams: I can't seem to ever get too far away from this book, written by MIT professor Alan Lightman. He teaches both Physics and Creative Writing, and uses this text to explore the possible interpretations of Einstein's theory of relativity through the lens of fiction. The book continues to blow my mind. It asks a lot of reader, requiring a fair bit of imagination along the journey, but for me at least, these imaginative leaps of faith are rewarded in spades (slang alert). These short little essays are more like invitations to play, and to think through what it WOULD be like if a lifetime was only one day etc.
8. Travel: Short or extended, walking, train or plane, English-speaking or non, so on and so on. Doesn't matter. I am thoroughly inspired by changing my geographical locus. Sometimes, when I'm too broke to travel far, just jumping on the subway for a few hours helps fill my head and give me grand plans and ideas and things to mess around with. Travel (large and small-scale) will always be an important part of my process. And I will always have a visceral image of travelling around Horseshoe Curve on an Amtrack train as part of my lived vocabulary.
Well, there you go. The Zen of That Girl. What works for you?
Love,
TGI
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