Every week at D'AI first year students present performance work for critique to the faculty, we call this forum Performance Lab. MFA students in the second and third year of the program attend Performance Lab and are asked to submit a weekly journal with reflections on the lab and how it relates to their own journey through the Work. This week's BLOG is taken from Gabe Mckinney's MFA2 Journal, posted with his permission:
I turned thirty years old this week. That's a shocker. Why journal about it here? Because it affected my work and I hope that it will continue to. To say that I'm unhappy about turning thirty is foolish; one is the age one is and nothing can be done about it. Clearly. Perhaps the real issue, and the thing I can say, is that I feel like I cannot account for my twenties as an artist. This is a heavy realization to carry around. I realized this week that I have to get serious about what I'm doing here, why I'm here and what I want out of a life in theater.
These are not things I do not already think about. I think about them often, in fact, but there is something so…terminal about becoming thirty. The twenties, that time of experimentation, exploration, explosion, is over. Now I have to stand up and account for what I have discovered in the past three decades. I feel I have not discovered much of worth, and the failure is a result of my own laziness, muddle-headedness, bad timing and bad decisions. None of the wishes I had for myself by this time in life have come to fruition. That's hard to admit and deal with. And I'm realizing that if they remain only wishes, they never will come to fruition. They must become tangible, realizable goals. Like a friend once told me, "You have to be successful at something. You can't just be 'successful.'"
Like I say, all of this influences the work. The panic of thirty set in this week. And this week, I got serious in some way I was not before. Maybe not "serious," maybe it is more that I got clear with myself. Clear about what needs doing. Clear that I have to be clear with myself and others. Clear that I cannot continue to compromise my impulses and instincts. Clear that I have to get my shit together, cull my resources and visions and opportunities and put something out into the world. I came to realize that, truly, nobody cares about my potential anymore, even me, especially me. I have to actually start doing something or shut the fuck up for good.
Performance Lab
After last week's realization that I do not know how to watch Performance Lab, I tried to come in with a new strategy on Friday afternoon. I came in with one overarching question through which I would filter all of pieces in the performance lab. And the question was this:
"What is the nature and purpose of theater?" I decided to use the success and failures in Performance Lab as opportunities to explore this question for myself.
I ended up making seventeen theses based on my observations that afternoon, some more interesting than others. Interesting were the ideas that I had heard before and always accepted as true, but arrived at this time by my own observation. An example of this was a note I made: "to fulfill the promise of a mask, be it an actual mask, the structure of the piece, a character, or the act of performing." This fact of theater rang truer to me in the moments I observed it failing and succeeding on Friday than it has before.
The most interesting one, or the realization I was most compelled by on Friday insofar as it relates to commedia is "To be and do what we cannot in this world." The joy of the commedia mask, in some way, is the freedom and catharsis that comes people with saying and doing things they cannot get away with in the real world. There was something so very satisfying for me to hear Cassidy's Punch call Ryo's Dottore "An old fuck." There was a crack in it that was solid and affirming, like a baseball player making contact in the bat's sweet spot. The timbre and musicality of the line was music to my soul. And it is something that I should probably say more often, but do not. Lesson learned, Punch. Lesson learned.
At any rate, I am going to continue to come to Performance Lab with this question and see what other insights or visions or myths I arrive at. Coming to an understanding of the nature and purpose of theater will be my modus operandi at Performance Lab for the foreseeable future. If Performance Lab is truly a lab for the first year students, a lab of doing, there is no reason it cannot be equally a lab for my observing.
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