today

In the interest of surrendering the pattern of facing a single direction and also just because I can't really be arsed, as they say, to construct a more coherent piece of prose, I am not going to write this entry in a linear fashion. But, of course, just by saying that, I've already started creating a cogent and repeatable line in the space that is the internet. But if you change your perception of it as you're reading this, you'll realize that within the writing there are many, many non-linear possibilities as well.

Anyhow.

Conversation turned to some refining and, appropriately, blurrying of the details of the actual shape of I'LL CRANE FOR YOU. Which parts of the score in terms of spatial relationship are fixed, which are being removed, which are entirely open to the performer.

Deborah also mentioned something like: remember that nothing is repeatable and everything is actually new. When you're performing rep, I presume, or, in my experience, an 8 show week, this perception of novelty is essential - this recognition that, in fact, despite superficial appearances or your best efforts as a performer to stick to the choreography established, what you do in today's performance is not and cannot possibly be the same as what you did in yesterday's (and that's to say nothing of anyone else who may be involved!).

It's astonishing to me how easily one can forget to perceive the newness when faced with the burden of needing to create something new. And so much of this work is about surrender, but not, to quote one of my cohorts, "a kind of beatific surrender" - more like, to quote another, "a submission". A maintenance of tension while at the same time letting go - noticing and letting go. The practice of presence and performance, not the practice of physical virtuosity or making up songs or stories or entertaining an audience (though, certainly, all of those things may be involved).

The simplest things can be so hard.

I am quoting what I wrote in my notebook based on what Deborah said here:

living and dying at once ---> aha nada