"Salman Rushdie gave me a ride back to the hotel, and so to bed." - Neil Gaiman, on his 'blog
Sometimes I really, really wish I was Neil Gaiman's shadow.
Sometimes I really, really wish I was Neil Gaiman's shadow.
Metamorphoses
On Friday, I did something pretty neat. Once again I visited the Steinberg Lab at NYU to help the undergraduate playwrights there hear their work aloud. Instead of reading one or two excerpts, however, I participated in at least five. They're gearing up for a presentation of a ten-minute segment of every student's work, and needed a day of hearing a bit of it all. The workshops at NYU are often an exercise in improvisation and flexible characterization (
oh-ho, it seems I'm a mine worker - all right, I'll be gruff and... - who wears pumps and is accused of singing soprano... - okay, I'll spin it Harvey Fierstein...
) but this took that adaptability to a different level for me. It's wicked fun, even when you face plant on something. Reminds me of role-playing games.
Speaking of which,
is coming around again, and
is actually venturing back from across the Atlantic for it. It doesn't commence until the end of May, so I've plenty of time to fulfill my promise to myself to run some event this year.
And on Saturday I attended a suggested-donation dance concert at
. Friends
and
were performing a duet of Matthew's, and I was pleased to find that it was accessible for me. Modern dance often isn't. (Or, perhaps more accurately, I'm often not accessible by means of modern dance.) There were a number of dances in the mixed program that I thought were quite good, and at least a couple that didn't shy away from having a sense of humor about themselves, which I always appreciate. One dancer in particular seemed perfect for my much-imagined "cartoon show." If anyone could convince you of running off a cliff and hanging suspended for a few seconds, I imagine it would be this fellow. Matthew's dance, on the other hand, was quite serious in its delivery and content. The hour-long program, called
Visa Voices
(it was choreographed by invitees of DNA's pool of students from other nations), was a very mixed bag indeed.
Occasionally I get frustrated with my limitations regarding my capacity for change. This may seem odd, coming not only from an actor, but from one who rather specializes in physical characterization and playing multiple roles in a single performance. It's my urge to transform that motivated these directions in my career, though, and I suppose that urge goes deeper than the boards. I wrote a few days ago about the merits of being able to switch rapidly between activities (see
), and now it seems to me that this virtue -- as I see it -- is closely related to my priority for change. As frightening as change can be when unbidden, sometimes I crave it so much that it's a little consuming. Spring is a good time for this, actually. It's what gets me out the door and jogging again, as it finally did this warm morning.
There are limits to what we can change about ourselves, of course, and I suppose recognizing those limitations is a valuable ability in some regards. Still, I enjoy imagining the possibilities more. When my life seems to be especially set, or even staid, I try to remind myself that life has been the most unpredictable story I've ever known. Even at its still moments. In fact, sometimes especially so. That doesn't mean I'll stop aiming to upset the routine. It does mean that the "routine" is changing even when it seems not to be, adding new steps, twisting the story and sometimes even altering my character.
Attention Spanning
There's a commonly held opinion that our attention spans are shrinking, and many people attribute that to our rapidly evolving communication and entertainment media. I don't disagree as to the causes for the phenomenon, but I do question that lack of specificity in this summary view of our ability to, and interest, in maintaining attention. I mean, if you take a little time to really examine—
Ooo - lookit - puppies!
What was I saying? Ah, yes: abbreviated attention spans. Was there ever a time in our history when culture didn't seem to be accelerating? You could point to the so-called "dark ages," but what you'd be pointing at would actually be a gap of written record, not some great backward lurch of civilization. No, I believe this sense of cultural acceleration lies more in our psyches and personal perspectives than it does in some larger, more-objective sense of time itself. We are an impatient bunch of creatures. It's part of what motivated us to develop tools and agriculture, and it applies to the human psyche whether you're talking about Twitter or gunpowder. We always want something "better." Ambition and impatience are kissing cousins, at least in my mental genealogy.
I think what we're really talking about when we worry over attention spans is worry over being a part of it all, of being included and/or contributing. I'm talking about more than trending here; perhaps Zeitgeist is a better word, but that still implies a cutting edge, which is more limited than my idea. My idea has less to do with something concrete and static, or even directional, and more to do with movement. Instead of staying ahead in a race, adapting to rhythms and adding something to a dance, maybe. Sometimes we're on the fringe, and sometimes we're setting the beat, but always we want to be in there and a part of it.
Naturally, my idea is going to be an inclusive one. (You can take yourself out of the Unitarian Universalist Sunday sessions, but you can't take the UUSs out of you . . . rself?) But in this case, I tend to be in total agreement with myself, and not just because it's to the advantage of my argument. (I promise. [Myself.]) It may sound like a philosophical argument, and it is, but it's also a practical one. Everything changes, and everything has the potential to change very rapidly, so it's good both to have the willingness to adapt and the centeredness to choose. For me, its akin to the error of multitasking -- namely, that it can't be done effectively. What can be done effectively is to do one thing at a time, and be able to switch tasks rapidly while keeping priorities straight. That can be effective, but true multitasking is a fault to any objective. Unless of course your objective is to make a mess of something.
If our attention spans have, on the whole, gotten shorter, its a result of successful adaptation to our environment, and anyway I don't see it as an irreversible condition. Music can be an amazing salve to a wind-burned attention span. Theatre, too, if one is willing to give it a chance. There's a general idea that entertainment, as such, is also a primary culprit in the criminalizing brevity of our attentions, but there I disagree as well. In fact, entertainment is pretty self-nullifying if it doesn't take us in well enough to influence our sense of time in some way, be it for the better or worse. The word itself, to "entertain," comes from an idea of holding something together. Maybe that refers to people's attentions, and maybe it means keeping the dance alive.
"Inebriate of air am I..."
That's a rather embarrassingly romantic line I copied in my journal right around college, freshman year (1995 or 6), I think. I say I'm embarrassed by it, but it has stuck with me and popped up every now and again, seemingly unbidden, in my memory. I had to look it up again to discover it was Dickinson and -- as though prescient in my "tweet" of yesterday -- remind myself that I didn't come up with it. Yes. I subconsciously tried to purloin Emily Dickinson. In my defense, I'm certain I'm far from the first, and I'm definitively certain I'll not be the last. Miss Dickinson's poem, in its entirety:
I taste a liquor never brewed,
From tankards scooped in pearl;
Not all the vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an alcohol!
Inebriate of air am I,
And debauchee of dew,
Reeling, through endless summer days,
From inns of molten blue.
When landlords turn the drunken bee
Out of the foxglove's door,
When butterflies renounce their drams,
I shall but drink the more!
Till seraphs swing their snowy hats,
And saints to windows run,
To see the little tippler
Leaning against the sun!
Odd to imagine a famous shut-in using inn and pub imagery, drunken bees or no.
The line recurred to me this time because I was thinking about my recent acceptance into the cult of
, and my choice of moniker there: AcroRaven. I hesitated to use it. At first I was trying all different permutations of "Jeff Wills," as it is my brand name as an actor. Alas, I arrived on Twitter too late for such luxuries (I still owe
a big 10-Q for getting me on to Gmail early enough to claim my address there) and I've just never adjusted to the idea of numeral incorporation into naming. Hence, AcroRaven. Right? Of course right.
Of course wrong. Both my embarrassment and my desire to use that name have quite a bit more to them than pragmatic consideration, or mere awkwardness over labeling myself using a species of bird for a site that claims all non-mute birds as its mascot. (Someone needs to get on some flightless bird sites. Cluck-er? Crow-er?) The fact is, I love ravens. And I've never seen one in person. The fact is, I call myself an acrobat. And I still can't stick a one-minute handstand. And the fact is, "AcroRaven" sounds like a really bad superhero, if you can even figure out how to pronounce it, and
that's part of what I love about it.
There. I said it. I made up that name because I love big black birds and acrobatics and seeing myself as a superhero.
The line from Dickinson spoke to me and I isolated it from its original context because it reminded me of how I imagine being a bird would feel. Maybe birds hate flying -- how would I ever know? I find their flight beautiful, however, and it reminds me of breathing deep and loving it. Exhilaration. There's a lot that feeds into my appreciation of birds, and ravens in particular, but suffice it to say that it's an animal that has come to symbolize for me my aspirations, turning my vision of who I could be into who I am. I may never be a bird, or renowned acrobat, or a superhero (in fact, the more I examine the reality of vigilantism, the less appealing it becomes, super-powered or no) yet a few years ago I never imagined I would know how to lift people to my shoulder, or have friends in Italy. These things came about because I can identify with the possibilities my dreams present.
Part of what finally launched me into the Twitter-sphere was a possible collaboration with a good, old friend of mine (one who dates back to my days of first admiring those crows that are the closest things to ravens Burke, Virginia has to offer). We're talking about creating a performance rooted in the ideas -- and maybe even the devices -- that allow us to have a creative collaboration in close-to-real time between East Coast and West, so naturally Twitter came up. As with any collaborative effort, not to mention plenty of the solo ones, it's difficult to say if anything will result from it. All the same, I'm looking forward to throwing those ideas out there, across the atmosphere, to see what sinks and what flies. Inebriates of air, aren't we all?
Inversion
It's surprisingly pliant and strong fabric, stretchy, but just to a certain point where it locks and holds at whatever length marks its limit. It's called a "silk," as if it represented a single object rather than a length or segment of some endlessly stitched material. "Silk," also as if it were the softest textile to use, but be careful: it will give you subtle burns, taking away skin at such microscopic increments that you won't feel the blister until much later. As with most circus skills, you've been deceived by how easy the experienced performers make it look and, in at least a small part, by the seeming innocence or mundane appearance of the "silk" itself. Nothing of the performance of that skill suggests throbbing forearms or aching, limited lats in the slightest.
So the first thing you learn is how to climb, which is also the first deception. It would seem as though you're powering your way up, Greco-Roman, arm over arm. In point of fact your abdomen is the one of whom a lot is asked, lifting your feet as high up the tail of the fabric as you can so you can lock it between your feet and push with your legs until a new, higher point is within the reach of your ready arms. Once you've climbed, it's time to learn to descend. That's the slide down, but a controlled one, because even at a reasonable pace the silk can tear at your dermis. If you want to be demonstrative, you can add a certain flair to releasing your grips, extending your arms out wide to accentuate how little you feel the burning resistance between your clenched feet.
Next up is to learn a couple of locks, or positions in which the fabric holds your weight without much help. From the ground you step up into a foot lock, and learn new sorts of pain from the silk, which has instantly attained the leveraging attributes of a jiu-jitsu practitioner. You see yourself down the road a ways, your new blister healed and with an instinctive understanding of how to settle your foot into this lock without your toes cramping but, for now, both aspects are toying with your pain relays. The hip lock seems okay, once you learn to trust the twist involved and to be cautious of your external reproductive organs (an interesting trade-off in advantages for your upper body strength, if you possess said external organs), until you try the straight-leg variety, which performs a relentless shiatsu massage on the delicate nerves in your hip flexor. Perhaps all this nerve conditioning is more than you ever wanted, and gives you pause, but you're on to the next thing and are sure everything will be all right now that you aren't in a straight-leg relentless-shiatsu hip lock any longer.
Why is it that all the deaths related to circus practitioners you've heard of lately happened off of silks?
The next steps integrate what you've picked up (or limped through) with inversions and, eventually, drops. That's a large part of the appeal of silks; they very easily encapsulate the dual appeal of beauty and danger people associate with circus acts. Because of the forgiving behavior of the material (ha ha), the performer can not only climb it and flare it out and bind themselves up, but he or she can also drop, fall, spinning toward the ground, saved at the last possible moment by the bobbing silk. Obviously, the more dangerous the drop seems, the better response there is to be had from the audience. Dropping head-first is something you want to do. And it takes practice.
It's a funny thing, being upside down. You never really,
really
get used to it. Practice doesn't ever quite make it to perfect. There's always some part of you that insists that things are going to continue as they have, with the ground beneath your feet and your balance based from there on up ("up" being a direction associated with your standing "up" hair). So when someone tries to teach you how to tie yourself upside-down, you have the curious sensation of feeling proud of being able to pull it off. Then they ask you to fall face-first toward the floor, and you have the curious follow-up sensation of trepidation over whether or not you tied yourself upside-down in the right, un-cracked-spine manner.
Drop! Catch! Not even a bloody nose, and you suddenly have an easier time imagining yourself enduring pinched muscles, swollen forearms and blistered ankles.
Last Thursday
and I took our first circus class together, and were taught beginner's silk lessons by
. I have been eager to rejoin the world of circus training, so there was little doubt in my mind about the fun and challenges to be had. Still, one wonders if he has lost anything, if the risks now outweigh the rewards, if new patterns will allow for older enthusiasms. I haven't, they don't, and they do. Can't hardly wait for this Thursday's follow-up lesson and time for more drops and inversions.