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musing on [number six. 7. 8. 08]
This is the
sixth issue of
musing on the muse,
my almost- monthly newsletter about creativity. If you don't want
to receive more musings, click this
books mentioned or related:
Zbigniew Herbert:
Poems: 1956-1998
Natalie Goldberg:
Robert Bly, ed.
(essential for learning about
poetry and consciousness)
Author's names are linked to Amazon. If you
purchase any of them via these links, they tell me I'll get a referral
fee but I've yet to amass enough moolah to warrant a check from the
Amazonians.
Love Cemetery [click title to buy] will be out in paperback by the end of May.
Since China
is my wife, my
recommendation of this incr
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It's past the time by which I told myself I'd send out Musing on the Muse #6. The problem isn't procrastination, it's an overabundance of musings that I want to write about. I started with remembering a book: The Gift, a classic by Lewis Hyde, just reissued. But I also wanted to develop some reflections about a workshop I recently took with Mary Overlie (who first articulated the Six Viewpoints, a fertile way of contemplating and doing theatre/dance), that led to more writing on attention and the connection between evolution, human attention and beauty. Finally, there was the literary form known as the object poem, which could help explain what deconstruction and post-modernism really mean. So here's the solution: I'm going to upload all of it to my blog for you to dip into when you feel like it or to ignore completely. (Your loss.) Among other things, you'll find two of my favorite poems by Zbigniew Herbert and Robert Pinsky there. Meanwhile, I'll use this space to let you know about events coming up this month that I'll be involved in and hope you can join me at. The Creative Moment returns for the fourth time! After the second one I thought I'd stop, but it was so much fun that I did a third and, I thought, final one in early June. But enough of the people who came to it were eager for more, so on July 20, 2 – 5 PM, at the same beautiful Western Sky studio in Berkeley, the fourth workshop will take place, Click here for registration and details. Theatre-Making Intensive.I'm offering another, longer, more intensive workshop on August 1, 2 and 3. The theme will be: creating original theatre that bridges personal (autobiographical) and collective (social, political, historical, ethnic, communal) material. I'll share some of the processes that my colleagues in Traveling Jewish Theatre and I have developed over the past 30 years of making theatre that weaves these realms together. Click here for details.
There be Dragons.
On July 30, there
will be a work-in-progress showing, at The Marsh in San Franc NET Gathering. On August 11, I'll head for New Orleans and this year's gathering of the Network of Ensemble Theatres, the grass-roots org that TJT helped found about ten years ago. In that time it's grown from seven member companies to over eighty! I'll be teaching a workshop and getting a large dose of community mojo. In 2009, NET will present a performance festival which will be hosted by the Dell'Arte Company in Blue Lake, California (Humboldt County.) Visit the NET website for the full story. Traveling Jewish Theatre. I'm also happy and relieved to be able to tell you that, if TJT's extraordinary fundraising campaign continues to go as well as it has so far, I'll be starting rehearsals for a revival of the Last Yiddish Poet to kick off our 30th anniversary season. More about this on TJT's blog Thinking about the Rosenbergs is the latest poem/song/rap I've written and recorded. click the title to find it As always, if any of you care to share any writing that you do on this suggestion above or have a response to anything I've said here, please email or post it as a comment on my blog
[a redundant
announcement. just to see if you're paying attention] |
Gussie and Sam a 12 minute play on video performed at The Marsh on March 4, 2008
performed by try this: After you've done this for as long as you want to, do a timed writing excercise of at least 10 minutes. See what emerges. Then write another 10 minutes on what you did not write about the first time. If you still have energy, write from the point of view of the object, in its voice. Finally, see what happens if you read all three pieces, alternating lines. Read line 1 from writing 1, from writing 2 from writing 3; then second lines from each. Scramble the order if you feel like it. You can do this in a group and go around a circle each reading a line from any part of your 3 pieces in turn. Click here to find more games, exercises and experiments to entice the muse and awaken your own creativity
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edible
book is hardly unbiased. But I really believe that China's dedication
to reconciliation, so beautifully brought to life in these pages, is
particularly timely
in the midst of the new willingness to engage with race and our
country's buried history. 
isco
of There be Dragons, a solo piece of theatre written and performed by
Evan Specter. The piece began its life nearly a year ago in a workshop
of mine. Evan has continued to develop it with my help and guidance as
midwife, dramaturge and director. Part coming-of-age story, part
spiritual adventure, Dragons is deeply personal yet filled with
self-deflating humor. This highly theatrical solo takes us from Venice,
California to Kathmandu, as an Amherst religion major looks for the real
thing via esoteric teachings, near-death experiences, giant Komodo
lizards and doomed romance. Evan Specter's post-post-modern embodied
storytelling introduces us to a psychic pool-cleaner, a Tibetan
secret-agent, a German past-life coach, and various Buddhist,
Hindu, Sufi and self-taught spiritual guides. For more, visit:
