Yesterday, I was sitting in Central Park, at the base of the C curved tree in this photo, experimenting with food coloring and glitter. A gust of wind blew away my excess glitter so that the leaves next to me shimmered. It was quite beautiful.
Today, I had an incredibly inspiring conversation with my roommate Amy, where we tried to figure out what we were doing with our lives. (Me as a recent college graduate, her in her final year.) I am doing well as far as a theatrical career goes. Last night I attended a staged reading that the Hangar did in the city, and got to reconnect with many people from the summer. It was great to stand in front of my former employers and say, "I'm designing five shows right now." (and getting paid for pretty much all of them.) However, I find myself with very little interest in climbing any "theatrical career ladder". I don't want fame, or anything like that… the only real benefit I can see is more money and it being easier to produce my work. I'm used to working on a great number of shows at once; I'm good at functioning that way and pretty soon, with more experience and connections under my belt, I'll be able to make a living that way.
My question is: do I want to?
I sense that, rather soon (one of my peers gives me 18 months), I'm going to master the technology of it, and then I'm going to get bored, twiddling my thumbs waiting for new toys. Sound is one of the more flexible elements, it has fewer necessary functions it MUST perform than set, lights, or costumes, so there's more of a discovery of how sound is essential in each production. That's exciting. But I'm already starting to feel that boredom sink in, because while every show is different, every show is also the same. I'm finding that it's the people who actually make the show worth doing or not.
This summer, I had the joy of working with some people who I want to work with forever. There was a strong (happily mutual) artistic attraction, finding both them and their ideas interesting, which revitalized my work. It was absolutely thrilling. I had a joke with one of them that she would come to New York and we'd be anonymous art fairies, doing anonymous public art pieces for the purposes of spreading beauty and magic. Like glitter on a leaf in Central Park.
In my conversation with Amy, we talked about how our generation from PHTS seems less interested in forming theater companies than even the people just before us. (That's the thing to do; leave school, found a theater company.) There are many problems with this system, which creates a lot of very young theater companies which mostly fold before they're 10 years old, and there's going to need to be a new option coming to the forefront for young artists presenting work, but beyond the producing aspects of it, we seem to be more interested in different ideas of organization. We're the guerrilla artists, we're the ones brought up in a very specific time on the Internet that celebrated randomness and open, collective creation across boundaries of location. Amy and I started talking about how to engage people who were not "artists" in the "I went to art school" sense of the word in free art and creation, and I started thinking about two things. One, the Cheap Art Manifesto, published by the Bread and Puppet Theater in 1984:
Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.
I believe art is important. I believe art should permeate the world. One of my main interests as an artist is helping to change how people see the world and each other, to see magic and possibility in all things. (see God in all things… same thing.) I believe that art is particularly essential in this moment because this is a moment of change, of things beginning to burst, and art can help lead us towards the positive right now. I believe that art needs to be everywhere--not just in the theaters and museums where people who can afford it can pay for it, but in the streets, on buildings, on the sidewalk, surprising you in a subway, shouted from a rooftop.
These thoughts about wanting to do more free art, about what is required of me to have a career as a designer, about how delightful it is to work with people I truly feel drawn to working with, has led me to a scary conclusion:
I am going to be happier and more artistically fulfilled if I do not have to make my living doing theater.
This is a scary thing to admit, and there's some young art school voice that's telling me it's cowardly, or a cop-out, or giving up, if I decide not to make my living doing theater. In an ideal world, I'd be able to make all the money I needed doing theater with the people I really want to work with, but that's not going to happen any time soon. In the almost-ideal world, I'd be able to make all the money I needed by novelwriting and doing theater with the people I really want to work with, but that's not going to happen immediately, either. I would rather have some weird, well-paying day job (today I was looking randomly at being an ultrasound technician or being an embalmer) and then only do the shows with people I truly want to work with, than do the number of shows I would have to do to make my living as a career designer. Why? I haven't been working that long, but I've been working a lot. I did 43 shows in 7 semesters. I did 11 shows this summer. I'm doing 5 shows right now. And now I'm 22 and approaching burnout, and I feel it kick in when I'm working on things I am not incredibly passionate about. I could keep it up, but why should I do that to myself and make it so I am unable to fully give myself with enthusiasm and energy to the shows I really want to do? Also, how will I be able to do more free art if I have to rely on art to eat?
My art fairy friend tells me that this is a very wise thing to recognize and that I've saved myself much stress and life trauma by realizing it now. Thinking about it, I am greeted with a feeling of relief and an overwhelming sensation that this is right, because it gives me a freedom to create without worrying about the business end of it. Funnily enough, by doing less I am then able to give and impact more. But it's odd to see a viable career burgeoning (in a field where this is difficult), and realize that it's not what I want. I think I had to see that it was possible. I just don't think what it'll take to make a living there is worth what it will cost. Not saying I don't want to do theater, at all. Not saying that I don't want to do theater professionally. (See notes on ideal lives in the previous paragraph.) Just saying that I don't want having to survive on it to make it sour for me.
With this realization I feel myself opening up in ways I haven't been open in a while. I feel like blogging again. Perhaps this was the thing I've been trying to figure out for the last half a year, that I had to go away to understand. I'm making it out and embracing life again, and it feels good.
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