Creativity

During my 5 months at the Odin Teatret, I came to understand how complexity is built.

The theatre’s director, Eugenio Barba, said that he’s had a fixation on this phrase from the Bible, “And the spirit became flesh.” How can the spirit become flesh? An answer he found is to produce mechanisms and repeat them. Elaborate them, build upon them, and eventually, “the story arises in spite of us.” When Eugenio builds a performance, he doesn’t have a script. He comes in with ideas and considers propositions. He gathers books, songs, poems, etc. in an alphabetized binder of impressions and he mashes them together and tears them apart to see what functions. He’ll ask the actors, “sing a love song,” try them all out, see if one works, and then maybe use it. He’ll ask each of them to find seven ways of using a tablecloth, or “I have to see [in your movements] a succession of Greek statues.”

This is a biological dramaturgical process. As a director, this style often means saying “I don’t know yet.” Instead of coming in with an idea, it has to do with seeing how things go and fixing (making solid / repeating) things as you go along, and then probably changing them as the structure becomes larger, so that what is being formed is like a living cell. For this to work, the director needs to feel like he/she doesn’t need to know what’s going to happen. What occurs in rehearsals is not talked about or repeated out of the rehearsals. Inside rehearsals, rather than being judged, Eugenio only determines what does or does not “function.” The work of the actor is considered holy, and is protected. Sometimes the structure from the work of six months is destroyed, but perhaps it must be done for the end result to function, and the work of those six months was necessary to get to whichever new beginning.

Eugenio supplies the analogy: when a child is taking shape, it isn’t thinking about what it will be when it’s 20. More important is the anatomy, nervous system, and voice.

This has become my modus operandi in creative work. Freed from the expectation of what I will create, I simply create. If I am writing, I just write. I collect impulses, jump off or build from them, and eventually put things together in a rough structure, work out details, and then shake the structure, toppling it each time until I have something sturdy enough, etc. If I am improvising in theatre/movement or writing, I just see where I go, allowing free association, and as best as I can take ego and expectation out of it.

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Every four years, the Odin gets painted on the outside. This summer, the time had come. For several weeks, on the days it didn’t rain, we would spend the afternoon painting. One of the episodes that sticks with me the most was one of those final days.

A small group of us had been working with Luis Alonso as a little workshop. We were working on solo performances and isolating skills—like voice, object work, and stilts.

The first time we used stilts, we glued ourselves to the walls. The second time, we could all walk. The third time, we could run and dance, and went outside. The fourth time, we used the stilts to explore what characters and movements we could make. The fifth time, for me, occurred when we were painting. Luis gave me a different pair of stilts that were not so good for walking, but viable for standing still. Wearing them was like becoming a Star Wars battle droid; I could easily be blown down by a gust of wind. The feet, a few scrawny rectangles, had to traverse the rocky and uneven terrain outside as I carried a bucket of brown paint and a small brush that I would use to make a single line all across one side of of theatre.

It wasn’t easy. Mirla, the other American at Planet Odin, helped me get to the side of the theatre, holding my hand and worrying for my life. I kept her there for the first little bit while I painted the little line, to catch me if the wind caught me or if I leaned too far in some direction or slipped on a rock. To step, I had to place all my weight in one foot, and then pick up the other with its added few feet in height, and not let that added weight or height lean me in any which way while I moved it closer and down, picked up the other, etc. When there was nothing to hold on to, each side-step occurred very, very slowly. When I had a pillar I could wrap one arm around, holding the paint and bucket in the other hand, I could make a few quicker movements and feel a little more secure before the next few minutes of fear.

After about an hour, I had finished the line. Luis came by and did not offer his hand. Instead, he kept just enough distance that I had a lot of doubt whether he’d be able to catch me. In the past he’d always done that, staying at enough of a distance that the concept of falling was integrally linked with tragedy — but, in the few times that I really did fall, somehow being right where he needed to be. As I stumbled along the gravel to get to a place high enough to sit down, he walked in front of me and asked me if I knew why birds build nests in high places. The first reason, he said, was to avoid predators near the ground. The second reason is so that when the little birds first try to fly from their nest, there’s enough distance from the ground to give them a flying chance. I wanted to say “but Luis, I’m not a bird,” but it was everything I could do to keep waling, arms flailing, and not fall.

A few hours later I was comfortably painting on the roof. Paul, who’s in charge of the theatre’s upkeep, walked by carrying a young bird that’d presumably fallen out of its nest and hadn’t survived the fall. That, I realized, is how it is. Sometimes, birds die before they learn how to fall. Luis had taught me how to fall. It was a lesson on how to live in danger.

Danger is something that can paralyze or that can facilitate a state of complete mental and physical awareness, of just being a human doing its best to stay alive from one moment to the next. Ordinary life runs on a commercial basis, less so on the realizing of an ideal, and doesn’t offer so much of this experience of being totally, dangerously, wonderfully and terribly alive.

A French animated film called I Lost My Body ends with the protagonist making a leap of faith onto a crane late in the night. For all respects and purposes, he didn’t need to do it. He wasn’t chased by anything. He didn’t need to get to anywhere in particular. But he had lost his hand, and his romantic interest didn’t work out, and he was left feeling aimless, disfigured, and alienated. He jumps from the roof to the far-away crane because he’s willing to risk his life, because the quality of being alive is at stake. He makes it, and that’s what makes the ending so satisfying: even though things haven’t gone so well for him and he’s just gambled his life on an aimless jump, it’s the danger and thrill of that jump which gives him the experience of how incredible it is to be alive.

In June at the Odin, the regular training was interrupted. Carolina Pizzaro, the group mother who led our training, gave a speech at dinner on the 16th. She said, “The sun is going to die soon.” Then she told a story of a man she knows who is an expert in Aikido and Thai massage, and who had learned wellness techniques like acupressure. He is 39 and was diagnosed with cancer last November/December, and was told he had a year to live. He says that this was the greatest gift he could be given, because it’s helped him focus on what’s important.

Carolina asked us to do no work the next day, to rest, and to think about what we would do if we had a year left to live. She said “I love you,” with a tenderness that told us we were family.

At that moment, I knew what I would do if I had a year left to live. A few weeks earlier, I had gotten an idea for a novel, and I had fallen in love with writing it. I realized that if I were to die in a year, I would continue to spend my time left writing the novel, even if there would be nobody around left to read it. And if I died without finishing the novel, then I’d have died doing something with love.

Hayao Miyazaki once said in an interview, “it's not that I'm making something adjusted to our time. It's that, as a person living in this time, I have found something I should make because of our time.” Maybe I’m being naïve, but that is much of what writing this novel has felt like.

And just like that, my understanding of what it means to love evolved. I’m finding that the times I’ve felt most in need of someone to love, what I’ve really needed is to feel love in my life. It’s beautiful to be in love with someone, but love is more than what’s shared between two people. Loving is a state of being, like tired or happy. Love is not something you do, it’s the way you are. Someone can unlock this quality in you, but tying your ability to love to the availability of someone to do that for you is really limiting. How many love stories are not actually about love but about security, comfort, well-being, jealousy, fear, lust, or pain? For me, if I say “I love you” and I mean something else, then I am collecting content for the psychological horror novel I will eventually write.

Thankfully, I no longer feel like I lack love in my life. It’s not because I’ve found someone, but because I’ve fallen in love with life. I am no longer in search of someone to experience life with. And jeez, this is hugely liberating. Maybe one day I will marry, but the important thing is that I no longer hold expectations about the people I meet—not because I’ve decided not to, but because my mind is no longer in need of a sense of union.

The days passed and one day of rest turned into another, and into a week, and into more. Throughout June, Carolina and Luis were working with Eugenio and the other Odin actors on the performance I’d come to see in the Collective Mind workshop in March. The Ikarus actors started self-directed training and work throughout the day, and Mirla and I had the month to ourselves to do our own training and creative projects. June became for me a month of cementing my own training and working on the novel. I transformed my room into a consecrated space, setting up knots between images and excerpts that I’m working to unravel through my writing.

But what’s a year? When I started my Watson journey, I felt time bearing down on me. I felt like I had a year, and then I’d probably be off to a job somewhere. The idea that I had only a year led me to take fast travel options to limit transportation time.

But our lives are the longest in human history. We have plenty of time. My fellowship has come to an end, but my adventure has only just begun.

I’ve begun to see that the goal isn’t always the destination so much as the journey to get there. There’s a difference between knowing this and experiencing it, and it has to do with what we really want. When the shift came for me that I really wanted the journey, my orientation toward travel changed. I wanted to walk, bike, sail. If it takes two weeks or three months to cover the same distance as a flight could in a day, I don’t really mind so much. I want to see the world and experience it for reals, and I’ve got plenty of time to do that. It’s not a matter of consumption; it’s a matter of nourishment, cultivation of an ability to relax, and of real, direct experience that inspires creativity, open-mindedness and exchange. It’s less about seeing the world than interacting with it, changing and being changed by it, and traveling in a way which enables that.

But I wrote much of this at a time when I strongly felt these things: purpose, love, and the quality of being alive. When a tempest comes and starts to sweep these out of reach, it becomes harder and harder to understand what you once did and to experience different circumstances with the same quality of joy and purpose. Purpose isn’t something you find and then boom you’ve got it, it’s something that you’re always reiterating within yourself, remembering and forgetting, connecting to and disconnecting from. Maybe disconnecting is its own way of falling. But a bird that’s already learned how to fly can figure out how to do it again.

Looking through my notes from the year again, I find an appropriate Rumi quote:

“The way of love is not 
a subtle argument.

The door there 
is devastation. 

Birds make great sky-circles
of their freedom. 
How do they learn it?

They fall, and falling,
they’re given wings.”