One week away from departure

So, a week away from departure and I’m kinda freakin' out. Probably a 7.5 to 8 on the anxiety scale. Have I ridden the bike enough miles? Jumped enough rope? Have I done enough sit ups? Do I really have those speeches memorized? I have been thinking about this for a year. Not off and on, but seriously every single day for a year. Am I ready for this? Can I dig deep enough to handle the day-to-day physical training? Do I have enough in the tank to be creative and collaborative and   . . . shit – this apprehension is exactly what I felt going to college the first time. Sometimes I only really feel alive by doing things that terrify me.

OK – so yea – we can start with the title. It is really lame. So lame I couldn’t not use it. I am sure something like it has been used before and will be used again.

That said, my intent here is to document the month that I will spend at The Saratoga International Theatre Institute (SITI) studying Suzuki and Viewpoints actor training, among other things. The why of this event is probably the place to start. In the spring of 2013 I taught a class on postmodernism that culminated with a discussion of the Wooster Group's House Lights video. This got me thinking about their process and about how relatively unfulfilled I felt about my own artistic process. The teaching part was fine, but my work as a lighting designer was starting to become a bit monotonous. No offence to the folks that I have worked with on and off over the years, but there were only a handful of times where I felt that spark, where I felt that the pieces were coming together in an interesting way, where the end result was somehow a bit more than the sum of its parts.  In recent years about two weeks before I would really dig into a design – so in anticipation of hang, focus, and tech, a thick and seemingly impenetrable cloud of depression would hang over me. It wasn’t the fear I used to get that I might not be able to pull it off. No after 80 some odd designs that wasn’t the issue, but rather an acknowledgement of how much work and effort would go into the process that may or not pay off in the end. So, needing to pursue something a bit more artistically engaging I contacted the Wooster Group to ask about their internships thinking that I might be able to get away for a month or so in the summer. Unfortunately they are really looking for folks to commit for at least six months, which, given my current responsibilities, is not really possible.

So, the idea sat fallow for some time. In April of 2015 my wife and I made an emergency trip to NY to be with our daughter, then a sophomore in college, as she needed to go into the hospital for about a week. Outside of visiting hours, which basically ruled our day, we did what we could to minimize expenses – 10 unexpected days in a hotel doesn’t come cheap. So we loaded up on the free breakfast in the mornings and filled part of our days by going to the gym. Realizing that I had been kinda-sorta exercising over the past few years, I began to think about a goal that might keep me a bit more focused. Over the years I have used things like soccer, triathlons, and bike riding to get my ass out of bed in the wee hours of the morning to get the gym on a regular basis – so I was looking for something like that.

During most of out hotel stay I was listening to music that reflected my mental state – which at that time was best matched by Miles Davis mid 70s acid-fried funk of Agharta. Once we retuned home I was in search of something a bit more soothing and turned to the band Rachel’s. I had a few albums, but really began to explore their whole catalogue, which included Systems/Layers, which I fortuitously bought on CD rather than download. The piece was a collaboration with the SITI company, and looking though the booklet I recognized a handful of names of folks I had worked with ages ago at a theatre in Massachusetts. A quick name search lead me to the SITI website and information about their summer workshop. The pieces started to fit. Prominent in the workshop is Suzuki actor training, a physically demanding method, so the goal of attending this workshop would certainly be something to get my ass to the gym on a regular basis, and it would provide a unique artistic focus. 

The first step was to contact the SITI folks to see if they would even accept someone my age to the workshop. The answer was positive, and so I started to shape my training toward this goal by focusing on weight training three days a week for an hour or so, targeting mostly legs and core, and more intensive stationary bike rides three times a week for 45 to 90 minutes. Adding jump rope to strengthen my calves I figure I must have done somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 jumps. It took the better part of a year, but eventually I dropped about 25 pounds and slowly increased my strength and cardio endurance (my wife's insistence that we abandon carbs at dinner certainly helped). There were, however, a number of other pieces to address. The next step was to run the idea by my wife. Trying to find a way to explain why I wanted to be away from home – a long way from home – for a month in the summer took some time. Once asked and given the OK the next step was funding.

A few years back I had audited an avant-garde film class with the goal of completing the bi-weekly assignments. I found the process of being a student again in a medium I was only passingly familiar to be somewhat unnerving. But, I learned a great deal about what our students go through on a daily basis. I vowed to audit a class at least once a year, but the complexity of the daily schedule and my full time job got in the way. So I pitched the idea of going to the SITI workshop to the Kenan Institute for the Arts as a leadership project that would get me back in the classroom. After a few revisions, I was awarded the funding. Now, the most complex part – to get accepted to the program.

I spent about three months working on my application, revising, rewording, getting feedback to shape it so whoever was reading it on the other end would simply have to let me in. I submitted the application in early January and then had a long long wait to hear back in April. Once accepted I upped my workout routine and spent even more time on legs and core, knowing that whatever I did would not be enough, but I would do what I could in the remaining months.

So, here I am two weeks away from departing for upstate NY not with a sense of dread hanging over my head, but that sense of nervous anticipation I get when going to teach a class not knowing what might happen that day. Fear is certainly mixed in with this anticipation as I worry about age, and about strength, and about focus, realizing that I will most likely be an anomaly, but I am also tremendously excited that I have the privilege of spending a month focused intently on something I care deeply about. Now I just have to memorize the texts we were sent and figure out how many books I’ll be able to pack.