Vietti starts, the spirit is willing but the flesh is decrepit

I never thought I'd think this, but I have a real respect right now for the version of me that's stuck back in time three years ago. I trained a bloody lot.

We've just started rehearsing Vietti (ohj. Akseli Aittomäki, other performers Juha Sääski, Minja Mertanen and Elina Putkinen). We've been a very physical theatre company for quite some time now, and I've never had any tolerance whatsoever for the actor whose idea of a warmup is a cigarette and a change of shoes, but all of a sudden I am that actor and it's tremendously interesting. For me, I mean. This is the problem, basically, with everything in my life: I find really, really dreadfully dull things absolutely scintillating with the delightful promise of information in its most nuanced expressions. Well. What can you do.

So the point being that anyway my body is not happy with me, my calves are screaming, I think I actually may have lightly bruised the flesh on the bottoms of my feet on the concrete floor, my shoulders are complaining, each muscle group in its own little song of suffering, and then to add salt to it all, my brain hurts.

I've forgotten, in a way, how to perform. Or why to. Or something to that effect. For the past couple of years, in school especially, I've been attempting to work without all of those things that physical performers hold to be self-evident and sacrosanct: concentration. The use of the body in its entirety. Awareness of balance and figure and spatial relationship at all times. A sort of soft gaze that takes in the whole space without specific focus. Rhythm control. Breath control. Control control. These all used to be givens when I walked into a rehearsal space, and then too many people called me "theatrical" when I was studying performance art, and I got very, very interested in what the hell made me theatrical, and also got very, very interested in breaking the habit, playing with it, exploding it, fucking around with the methods of performance. The result, I am aware, is often messy, like someone who would have a great performance if they'd only bother to put in the extra bit of effort required. Or like someone who suddenly blanks onstage. I'm really into those moments. I want to know exactly what I'm doing when I'm performing and how I do it.

And but so I had very much thought that because it was so difficult to break theatrically trained habits, that I would never be able to lose them. Apparently I was wrong. I was really surprised in rehearsal to see my fellow performers go more or less directly to a kind of mode, a performance mode, because that is the tool you use in order to make a performance. It's like this: you want to put a nail in a block of wood. You don't even think about it; you go looking for a hammer. It's sensible, normal, and it has worked before. However, there definitely are other things you can use to put a nail in a block of wood, and they might be less efficient, uglier, slower or faster, but they are ways of doing it. Obviously, if any of them were fantastically efficient, they'd catch on and we wouldn't have hammers, and so it's reasonable to assert that the hammer is still the best tool--if all you want to do is get that nail in. However, if you're researching the act of putting nails in two-by-fours, you'd be missing something if you limited yourself to the hammer. And I find it very difficult to turn off, this tendency to treat performance as if it were a nail.

Which, this will basically only last until I have a clear idea of what I'm doing and why and how and to what end--and that's not nearly as daunting as it sounds, because it's also a fairly collective choice, with extra weight given to the director's input. I have gigs coming up next month with Kalevala dell'Arte, which is masked commedia, meaning it's one of the most stylized, set kinds of modes of performance you can ask for, but it's very easy to do because those questions of how and why don't need to come up anymore. You just train it and do it to the best of your ability. In the meantime, it's interesting to be stuck in an unpleasant place, which is how I feel--unpleasant--when in the middle of improvisations et al when I know for a fact that I'm following directions, and I also know (quietly but for a fact) that I'm breaking unspoken rules of theatre. As long as it doesn't hurt anyone, I don't mind.

And so but actually where I'm going tomorrow is to hell. Signa's Villa Salo is where I'm heading, to have my brain taken off and rewired for me again. I don't even know what to expect; last time I saw a show of theirs at PSI 2008 or so I'd never heard of them and had no prejudices or preconceptions whatsoever, so this is very different as I've bought a plane ticket and I'm not planning on leaving the Villa for four days. I'm not sure if I'm excited to be going or dreading it; they're just that disturbing. What makes it complicated is that I find things that disturb me greatly to be, on some level, the most valuable things I can find. The other complication is that I'm a total wuss.

splutter and choke and come up all lovely

The last 18 months have to constitute my most un-writingest period ever, pretty much in all formats that do not have a 140-character limit, and even there I haven't been prolific. My personal journal—something I've done since I was basically able to hold a pen—boasts a record low number of entries.

It's not a sudden occurrence, either, but as a wild guess I'd hazard that it has something to do with moving to another country as an actor and subsequently eschewing linguistic development in favour of working on physical ability. After all, since moving to Finland I became far more physically proficient onstage than I ever thought I would be. Keeping track of several details at the same time became possible: where the weight is, how far I am from that exit, the distance between fingers, whether I'm breathing well, the angle by which a torso protrudes from the hip bones, &c.

However, it doesn't seem to be very easy to be proficient in very many things at once, especially when one of them is really in a different realm. I mean, it's one thing to be incredibly knowledgeable about biology and literature, but appears to be another thing entirely when you take on a brand of knowledge that isn't available in books. I seemed to lose my ability to write, to concentrate, to sit for long periods. Actually when I started school, I noticed in the first two months that all of the dance students and myself were miserable in lectures and writhed like tadpoles in our chairs, not because we were uninterested but because it's painful to sit still if your body and brain are tuned in movement.

Also, I started to use Finnish more, and to spend less time with native English speakers. Skipping a whole bunch of sentences here in which I describe that process and how it feels when you've relied on language so heavily all your life, the net result has been something like a DIY amputation of something... not, say, an entire right hand, exactly, but certainly something more useful than an appendix.

So lately I've managed to spend time in English-speaking countries; I was in London, San Diego, New York. I heard people playing with English again, a quotidien thing that nevertheless to me was utterly fascinating. I found myself drawn to usage overheard in the subway like it was a shiny new toy. A relic from an alien spaceship. It was just so cool to hear the way people talk.

And so but it's hardly surprising then that lately I've simply thrown myself into the well disseminated arms of Stephen Fry and have been consuming rather more than one ought to of podgrams, audiobooks, episodes of Jeeves and Wooster and of A bit of Fry & Laurie, novels, commentary, documentaries, radio programs, a truly horrible thing to say when meeting a member of the royal family (or anybody for that matter) that comes from an episode of Whose Line in the 1980s, and then don't let's forget the awesomeness that is QI. All in all it's been very pleasurable. I've probably written more this week than I usually do all month, and then of course you get the downside which is that all of my friends are having to put up with me getting a bit freaky with my vocab. Not that they know it's a Fry thing. I just see the slight askance confusion when "antipodean" and "vasoconstrictor" fall out from between the teeth... but what can I do. I rather like it when my interests take a U-turn; it might contribute to my essential annoyingness but I really can't be too bothered about that as long as life is good.

Language, Tiger, language.

David Foster Wallace. This is water.

As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

- DFW, "that keynote address" at Kenyon College 2005


I'm supposed to be writing essays right now, and I'm just completely useless. I woke up late (I see why, now, the universe was attempting to spare me for a few more hours) and noticed a huge amount of email in my inbox, most of it from Wallace-l Digest. Irritated at their obvious technical difficulty, I clicked one to check at what point they would start to apologize for the mess, and the headline "DFW suicide?" hit my eyes like words from a foreign language. I remembered that the following headline in my inbox was one from a good friend (and fellow DFW fan) with the sum-it-up headline "FUCK." All of a sudden it was true.

It's much easier for me to grab lines others wrote on the digest (writers, tell me if this pisses you off) than to put it in my own words, sometimes. Like Matt M here:

"The scary thing, and it must be so for some of the recovering addicts here, it's at least scary to me, is that I feel like if anyone was going to win the battle, it'd be someone who was almost bottomlessly sensitive and monsterously (sic) intelligent. I understand here that it's a bit selfish to take this decision he's made and extrapolate it into some kind of universal condition to be applied to all those struggling, but it is at least in some ways difficult not to, because through his writing, we've many of us discovered how much his views about the world around resonate with us. And for those views to terminate here is frightening."

I don't get gutted over writers, artists, dancers, people I don't know. Not usually. A major chunk of it truly is the fact that he advocated (and I thought I was starting to learn) keen and intelligent awareness, rigorous compassion, and having a sense of humour to balance out the sheer horror you find when you do see the world for what it is. Of hearts he was most generous, at least in his writing. There are artists who can communicate about depression or about the personal experience as something also universal, but there are very few who can ever do it with the degree of minutiae/large scale as Wallace did.

And but so. When the one person in life who you thought really had figured out how to "see" the world and still survive and in fact be a really wonderful beautiful contribution to humanity in general hangs himself, where do you go? Did I just have the guy on an invisible pedestal? What happened? Yesterday I would have said I considered DFW to be the best writer (possibly also thinker) of his generation, an excellent wordsmith and essayist, devastatingly funny and true in his stories, and someone I looked up to. Now I realize I thought he was even more. Deep down, I thought he had figured out how to be happy. I thought he was immune to being human. It's an oversight that doesn't make me feel good; even though it can be a great compliment for me to say of another human being that they were freaking phenomenal in the whole having a soul department, I feel in a way I disappointed him by not being aware of what his advocacy of awareness made me think about him.

And I'm sad that it's not bigger news, although at the same time I'm simultaneously comforted and left unsatisfied by every news snippet and blog reaction that I've read (including my own). My eyes started stinging again when I googled for news and saw that someone on Wikipedia had already changed the entry to David Foster Wallace was instead of is. How cruel. The mechanism of information, of recording the story.

I have a very large, old copy of a Webster's dictionary that has bios of American presidents as one of the indices, and since the dictionary was published in the middle of Nixon's term, he's the last entry in there, all smiling and optimistic and winning, and I have always loved the book for this. I have loved that the memory of how things were can be frozen in a published book. The living, all-consuming monster of the Internet makes me shudder in comparison. Given that DFW's death chapter on his Wikipedia entry was probably written by someone who cared enough about his books to notice, does it not somehow rankle that someone, at least one fan, felt compelled to make sure the entry was up to date? It's not the same as journalism or blogging, where commentary can commiserate; it's the land of impartial, cold hard fact, and it feels like twisting the knife. How odd. Reminding that the mechanism of memory is also impersonal, that the show must go on and too bad about your writer, but we have a cold hard fact to update here. I wanted to see the memory of an old time, recorded like a photograph of factual account, like an encyclopedia. I'll have to go to a real encyclopedia for that I guess. I wonder why that set me off so much.

Anyway, this is all water. And this makes me feel better.

Itäminen #1: Sydänkärpänen

Tomorrow's the first of my Hiidentie performance series. The first one's called "Sydänkärpänen" (Heart Bug). On my flickr pages you can see some of how it was made. I will post video here after the show.

Meet you by the old dead tree

Aika: ti 24.6.2008 klo 16
Paikka: Google maps link eli tässä (katso kuvaa):


Some of the messages that went in this time:

- An amazing, amazing drawing by a girl who lives in Salo. The sydänkärpänen is her invention. "Olipa kerran pieni kylä. Siellä asui outoja eläimiä ja hyönteisiä."
- Pulmunen
- Hyasintti
- Koivu (horseshoe drawing) 16:00 xxx
- Hahtuva, joka lentää tuulessa
- Kesäkuun alussa laitumet ovat huikean vihreät, mutta karjaa ei näy missään
- Lämpö ja aurinko, kasvun voima! Kuumuus ja paahde, tappava kuivuus!


The idea behind itäminen, as visible in the flickr photos, is that I collect suggestions ("seeds") from people, plant those pieces of paper somewhere along hiidentie, and then return a couple of weeks later to make a small performance with the ideas that have come up. I can't guarantee that everything that is planted will bear fruit; but if it dies, it will at least create fertilizer for the other ideas.

The people who make suggestions don't necessarily get to see the performance, distance and holidays being what they are. I'm still interested in the energy this sort of long-distance performance interactivity seems to be creating. The opening day was very warm, both in weather and in mood, and it seems to have carried over.

The overall project is Taiteen Tiet (art roads), and it's a long-term environmental/site-specific art project in Finland, based around the town of Salo. Each year a stretch of road is more or less adopted by some artists, who make installations/performances for that place. I wanted to stick more with performance than installation, but I also wanted there to be some kind of element involved so if you can't be there for the performance, you get to take part in some way, and interact with me (and me with you) in a relaxed fashion.

The place marker and mascot

Some days it feels like the pieces all flow together; the more I tweak how one seed interacts with the overall idea, the more it can include or exclude another, and the concept remains terribly fluid. I want to be able to include everything; I also want to streamline it to a simple idea. I want to just say "this is what your crazy collective consciousness gave me," and I also want to say "I'm a-puttin' the art in this here performance, I'm going to organize it all so beautifully." To be honest, what has come to my mind with Sydänkärpänen feels a little bit silly, but on the other hand that's no fault of mine: I'm just a performer taking instructions here, right?

Wordled an older post

What's presence? (AKA I need you for research)

Hey all you performers out there! I'm working on a small research paper and I'd love to have your input. If you have a minute or two, answer these questions and either leave them as a comment on this blog, or copy-paste them in an email to johanna.macdonald(at)gmail.com.

Voit myös vastaa suomeksi jos haluat! Ja pliis excuse my huono Finnish :)
Here we go...

1. Are you a performer? If so, what kind of performance do you do?
Oletko esiintyjä? Mitä sinä teet? (Tanssija, näyttelijä, live art taiteilija, jne.)


2. In terms of performance, do you talk about a performer's "presence," and if so, what does it mean to you?
Performanssin suhteen, puhutko esiintyjän "läsnäolosta"? Jos kyllä, mitä se tarkoittaa sinulle?


3. How would you describe your presence when you are performing?
Miten luonnehtisit oma läsnäolosi, kun esität?



4. How would you describe another's presence when you are watching them perform?
Miten luonnehtisit toisen läsnäolo, kun katsot esitystä?


5. Where does your concept of a performer's presence come from?
Mista synty sinun esiintyjän läsnäolon kasitys?



Kiitos, thanks for your help and I'll let you know how my BIG old project pans out.