It was all a ruse!

24 March

And so with little fanfare and much haste, I head for home.

This was decided last Wednesday, in Belo Horizonte, when it was clear that my attempts at a Brazilian internship weren't going to work out; even the teaching internship I could get at Grupo Galpão is not really what Joan and Ronlin want for me. So I am a month short of completing the project, but there is no more point in spending time and money in Brazil; I need to go home and work.

Right now I'm killing time at Garulhos airport in São Paulo; I fly to Houston tonight and to San Francisco tomorrow morning. I'll spend the night in SF with Lindsey B. Jones and drive up to Humboldt in a rental on Wednesday. (All this was left off the blog, by the way, so that I can surprise Leila, who's not expecting to see me for another month. I hope she likes surprises.)

Joan did think that a maskmaking project would be good for the internship, but she wants me to train with a master, to get mentorship and feedback. I'm really turned on by this possibility, especially the possibility of learning to carve wood and work with leather. There is a former Dell'Arte student in Sweden who trained with Sartori who's a good bet; there's also a maskmaker in Mexico City that we have a promising connection with. He's apparently a Commedia master, but knows some of the Mexican traditions as well; this is the possibility that I'm most turned on by, as my brief stay in Mexico in January proved that my work there is not done.

My work in Brazil is not done, either, and that is a matter that I will have to sleep many nights on. The Cavalo Marinho is something I want to dig much deeper into, which dovetails nicely with my interest in Maracatu and Coco. But how and when am I going to get back to Recife? Juliana and Alicio will be in Pernambuco in December, at the height of the Cavalo Marinho season, and I suppose it is possible I could come then and finish my internship doing field research. That would be a kick... but I do want to learn the leather work. I dunno.

I want to come back to LUME and work with masks. I think they want me back. When? Some unnamed date in the future. And now I have some other good friends in Campinas, the students that I lived with, who were heartbroken when I told them I was leaving.

It's weird being the honored guest; it's weird being fed and housed and made to feel like I'm the one doing the favor. They were honored by my presence and took pride in doing things for me, driving me around, introducing me to their friends, to their neighbors, to the cooks at the restaurants we ate at, to the bands we heard at Casa São Jorge.... I kept telling them that I was the lucky one, here, but they didn't seem to believe me. This sends my Protestant Guilt reflex absolutely haywire. (If you're not familiar with Protestant Guilt, it's related to the Protestant Work Ethic. It kicks in when you're afraid you're not working hard enough.)

Anyway, for now there is plenty of work on the table. I need to finish the Carnaval paper and the south American Explorers article. I need to come up with a piece for Ferdinand. And I've restarted work on my failed thesis project, which I hope to produce somewhere next winter. And of course there are plenty of masks I can make now....

Home again, home again. Jiggety jig.

==================================

26 March

Writing from a Denny's in Santa Rosa....

I spent the night in San Francisco with good friend and clown Lindsey B. Jones, who was not her usual drinking-buddy self last night; she's got a cold, and I was pretty beat myself. So we were out cold at 10:15. But it's nice to see her, and to know that her face means I am close to home.

So this is the last post from the road for this blog. I'll keep it going, because I feel like it's potential as a writing tool is largely untapped. I admit I've been lazy and a little afraid about writing publicly like this; it's hard to get into a groove, or even to know what the groove should be.

So I'll keep working that out.

Thanks for listening.

Improvisation ON!

Well, I jsut got back to Campinas after two days in Belo Horizonte, where the head teachers from Dell'Arte (Joan Schirle and Ronlin Foreman) were attending a conference. And they have firmly put the kibosh on the mask proposal. I can see their point: it is basically a freelance job, and they require mentorship for the internship program. So I'm disappointed, but not upset. And I think my relationship with LUME will survive; maybe we can do a mask project together at some other point in the future.

So, now I must look for another company here to work with for the next month. There is a good possibility back in Belo Horizonte, which is a really cool city. So that's my first lead.

Stay tuned....

So, LUME has accepted the mask project offer. Now I'm just waiting to hear from Dell'Arte that they have signed off on it....

Today I have to find the Campinas bus station, to buy a ticket for tomorrow to go to Belo Horizonte, a city about 8 hours away. There's a big international conference there that LUME is making a presentation at, and where Joan and Ronlin from Dell'Arte will also be making a presentation. So I'll be there for a week... hopefully, it'll be a nice change of scenery.

Still raining in Campinas.

In my notebook yesterday I wrote a little of the frustration I was finding in zazen and reminded myself that this is the point I get to every time I try to bring zazen back into my life; it's fun and a challenge for about a week, when frustration sets in and I usually quit. So this is the point that Jacqueline (the woman in Mexico City who gave me the zafu) was telling me to push through. Sitting today, I could often get to a count of three before my mind wandered off for the next five minutes... progress, I guess.

I think a big part of the frustration yesterday was actually not with zazen but with my whole experience here. It's pretty clear at this point that LUME doesn't need me for much; they're a pretty self-contained operation. And unless something changes for them to give me something active to do, I can't stay here. It's that simple.

Carlos Simioni, the guy who invited me here, acknowledged this to me yesterday. When I got to the theatre, he said he needed to talk; when we were able to sit down, he apologized and said that there had been some misunderstanding about my purpose here. He didn't really realize that I needed to be here as part of my degree program.... And that was all pretty clear to me, by this point. The day before, I had faced this fact pretty clearly and decided to make a proposal for staying; otherwise I'm afraid I'll have to go to Belo Horizonte and try to finish the internship at Grupo Galpão or somewhere else.

I think, at heart, it was the language difference that made for a miscommunication between me and Simi, and I'm not angry with him. I don't think Brazil has quite the same system of "internships" (or "estagios" in Portuguese) that we do, and the formality of the arrangement wasn't apparent to him. So it more or less amounts to an unfortunate misunderstanding, but it still leavees me with little to do for LUME that will satisfy my faculty at Dell'Arte.

I made this proposal to Simi: I would build a set of Expressive masks, covering six emotions, that LUME could use as part of their general research practice. I would make twelve masks total, with each emotion depicted in a state of innocence and a state of experience. I got the innocence/experience idea from what I've heard of Sue Morrison's mask teaching; I've never tried it myself. But I've wanted to do a set of expressive masks for a long time, and six masks is not enough labor to fill out another month and a half's worth of time here. Twelve is a good number, and an immense design challenge for me. And when the masks are finished, I will lead a workshop in wearing the masks with the seven LUME actors, and leave the masks with the company when I go home. He liked the idea, although he said the company never uses masks, and siad he would propose it to the other six today. They would essentially be taking on this new aspect of their research, almost just as a favor to me. I don't know if they'll go for it, but we'll see what happens...

On a side issue, I've gotten to see LUME's main clown show three separate times in the last two days. It's called Cravo, Lirio e Rosa and features just Simi and Ricardo Pucetti, with Simi playing two different clowns. It's very funny, although it's pretty random; they get away with a lot of stuff that, if Dell'Arte students tried, would get us pelted with tennis balls or just kicked offstage. The show is basically just a couple of clowns showing up and doing some goofy things, but with no real arc or set of themes (though the things themselves are generally pretty funny, and Ricardo is a brillaint improviser). Maybe that's just my own knee-jerk Aristotelianism kicking in, demanding unity. More troubling is that they don't play their relationships consistently; Ricardo is pretty low status, and Simi (with both his characters) takes high status initially, but the relationships change to equal status a number of times with no justification, as far as I can see. Maybe I'm just being sophomoric here, and I'll have more sympathy when I've done a show of this scale and caliber myself someday....

Cats and Dogs

It's raining cats and dogs right now. The usual clear hot morning of São Paulo state in late summer, with a steady a crop of cumulus clouds that sometimes build into thunderstorms, has given way to a front of some kind. It's been dark and moody all morning, and now the rain is torrential. The breeze is almost cold.

I just got up from sitting zazen. The struggle to let myself just sit, just be there with the zafu below me and the wall in front of me, is epic. I try counting my breaths and can usually only do one or two before I'm reminded of something, or some noise from the kitchen comes in and makes me think.

Noise doesn't make me think. Who am I kidding? I willingly go to the noise with thought.

Question of the day: why don't I let myself just sit? Just be there?

The answers are probably old, and that's why I don't notice them.

Blog/slog

I'm getting bogged down in the effort to write a good blog.

That bit about the unicycle took me a whole day to write and then another three days to decide if I should post it, or if I should reduce that whole story to about three sentences, which might have made the point just as well while sparing you my own personal Rocky Balboa saga. And it was a distraction, really, from what I had originally sat down to write that day, which was also a story of overcoming anxiety. I think my ambitions to make this a searching account of my experience are overwhelming my ability to just write about what's happening. I'm missing the trees for the forest, as it were.

So today I'll just write about today, and not worry about how it fits into the larger pattern...

Today being Saturday, my hosts at this house in Campinas did the weekly housecleaning. They don't let me contribute much. I'm in the weird position of being some kind of honored guest, the exotic American, and they really want to take care of me. So they cook for me, they don't let me clean, and they're not charging me any rent.

At this point, though, I'm sleeping on a mattress in the living room, where the TV is on most of the time. My computer is set up on a desk near the front window; for the first week I was out here, I was sitting on a cushion next leaning on the wall with my computer on my lap. Now, for a chair, I have a strange wooden structure, on which I've placed another cushion and the zafu that I was given as a gift in Mexico City.

Did I tell you about the zafu?

Zafus are the round black cushions that Zen Buddhists sit on to meditate. It turns out the Bed and Breakfast where I was staying in Mexico City was also maybe the only Zendo in the whole town; I got along very well with the proprietess, and told her that I'd been experimenting with Zen during the last few years but was struggling without a teacher. She said, "you don't need a teacher. Do you have a zafu? Your zafu is your teacher." I told her I didn't have one, and she then insisted that I take one of hers, since she saw I had some spare room in my luggage... And she made me promise to use it, even if I was frustrated and struggling. She reminded me that frustration was part of the path... So I took the zafu and have hauled it around with me the whole time, convinced that receiving it in this way was an event of karmic significance — a great gift. And here in Campinas I've been able to use it. It's almost a regular part of my daily practice, now, with tai chi, stretching, guitar and pandeiro practice. And it's a big struggle, but I'm now trying to just embrace the struggle, and let the practice take root. I think that's what she meant for me to do.

The Zen focus was key to my ability to be funny in the Clown block my first year at Dell'Arte, and it's been key here too. In the Cavalo Marinho class at LUME I was able to achieve more focus and presence than I think I ever did in Blue Lake. That was enormously frustrating at first: did I waste my time there? Or was the (self-imposed) atmospheric pressure of The School a roadblock that has dogged me my whole life? Aren't I supposed to be a better actor now than I was in school?

OK, this was a ramble but I got out a lot of the info I've been struggling for days to write...

Instructive.

Side note on Samba

The samba de roda ("roda" means "wheel" or "circle") was unbelievably cool, a bunch of guys younger than me playing songs from the 50's and 60's--stuff you hear on David Byrne's O Samba compilation. There's a huge movement to keep this music alive here, kind of like the Swing revival in the US, but without the irony and self-consciousness. It's not a masquerade, like all the "rockabilly" fans in the States who tried to look exactly like the '59 Jerry Lee Lewis (as if he were a car) during the dot-com bubble. The bandleader did have a haircut like I imagine Jim Morrison would have had if he'd lived to experience disco, but it wasn't connected at all to the music. In other words, I suppose, there's plenty of postmodern trendiness in Brazil, but it wasn't dominating the bar that night.

So, the eye doctor saga ended happily, if somewhat expensively (cheaper than in America, though.) Henrique made me an appointment for the very next day, and I had new contact lenses one day later, and new glasses the day after that. A big relief. I hadn't been to the eye doctor in four and a half years... my prescription didn't change, save for a slight increase in astigmatism in my left eye. I've been using contacts a lot on this trip for performances. I carry them around in my prosthetics bag, with my red noses and false teeth, because that's what they are to me: a neutral alternative to the mask of my glasses, and a prosthetic of sorts. They allow me to access the space of the stage visually, and when I'm wearing a mask (like during the carnaval parades in Recife) they're essential. I also like wearing them when I'm drawing or focussed specifically on photography, because they give me a full, focussed, undistorted field of view that doesn't change when I rotate my head. Glasses, in general, are easier because my sight is not so bad that I need them all the time, and I like being able to take the glasses off and put them on quickly and at will. Contacts tire my eyes quickly, and they're really uncomfortable for reading or working on the computer... I also have to confess that I like how glasses make me look, which is more to the point of why I'm boring you with this stuff here: I have to contend with the fact that my glasses are a mask, a contemporary sort of Dottore that has a social significance — they confer a certain intellectual status by symbolizing knowledge and wisdom, like Piggy's glasses in Lord of the Flies. And I have to admit I'm attached to that image of myself. Call it vanity or insecurity (the beast that lurks behind the mask of vanity) or what you will. For a long time I wore a goatee for the same reason. It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with people adopting these kinds of masks in daily life, but an actor has to at least be aware of them. And like any mask that confers status, they can be used to abuse others, which is something that I personally have to wrestle with: I can be a real asshole when I feel like I have to prove how smart I am. So taking off the glasses, at times, makes me confront the silly fear I have of other people by removing the weapon I guard myself with.

Then, the problem is that I can't see very well!

A zen problem that will be a physical component of the rest of my life...

If you think this was a pointless digression, let me propose that it's exactly the kind of digression that I wanted to be able to write, that made me name this blog Circo de Nada. It's relevant also because getting new glasses and contacts was something that I should have taken care of before I came on this trip--last year, even, or even the year before that. But I'm not very good, a lot of the time, at taking care of myself, and my procrastination habit has gotten me into a lot of trouble over the years. So the drama of getting new lenses was an unnecessary drama, entirely of my own making.... a circus of nothing. Maybe you don't want to read this kind of confession. But I hope that publicizing these personal problems, the way the clown has to expose what he's most embarrassed about, will help me transcend them.

An illustrative digression:

In 1996, when I was 24, just out of college and drifting around Denver trying to find meaning and purpose in my life, I dug out the unicycle that my mother gave me for Christmas in 1982 but which I had never learned how to ride. I was determined to conquer it. I started on my mother's front patio, a concrete surface that featured two wooden pillars about ten feet apart, holding up the roof. It also had a fence and some bushes which mostly hid what I was doing. I wrapped my arms around one of the pillars and tried to find a way to just keep the unicycle underneath me. As I pedaled, of course, I had to move away form the pillars, and usually only made the wheel turn 180° before my legs locked and I had to step off (wipe-out falls on unicycles are rare.) But a few times I'd get a whole 360° of movement, and after an hour or so, I had actually managed to pedal from one pillar to the other a few times, and was left with the undeniable knowledge that my mother's patio was suddenly too small a course to learn on.

There was a park across the street, with a fenced-in tennis court and a long circuit of asphalt paths, but not many places where I'd be able to hang onto something while I mounted and tried to ride. Worse, it was public. If I practiced out there, people would see me fail. But something — desperation, I suppose — in my desire to ride the @#%*ing thing made me decide that public failure didn't matter. So I went out there, and found a small restroom pavilion next to the playground with some pillars, like Mom's patio, but with more distance between them, and I discovered that the ten-foot trips became more and more frequent. One day I'd go fifteen feet. The next day, I'd go fifteen feet three times and never less than five feet anymore. The next day I'd do twenty feet... and pretty soon the pavilion was too small for me too.

In the meantime, I discovered that most of the other people in the park weren't much of a distraction. Kids would be startled at first, but get bored quickly as they saw I was only practicing and didn't really do anything spectacular. Adults usually tried to ignore me, like they were embarrassed. Not by what I was doing, but by something else, which took me a long time to recognize.

After a while I had to stop aiming for the pillars and had to venture out onto the paths and circle the pavilion. When I fell, I'd head back to the pillar I started at and try again. And after many days even that course was too small for me, so I had to face a new fact: it was time to head out onto the path that circled the whole park, because that's where I'd get the distance I needed to practice. But there were no pillars out there — so I'd now have an additional challenge: mounting the cycle without holding onto anything. Because falling off out in the middle of nowhere was now inevitable.

I learned. I struggled, sometimes beyond the point of tears, with mounting the unicycle and immediately riding away. When I succeeded, it would take all my concentration to not be distracted by the joy of this momentary success and move my focus to the still-difficult task of simply riding forward. I contended with hills, which raised the stakes — you try mounting a unicycle that immediately wants to go backward and to the left! I learned to juggle while riding, using clubs instead of balls, because the clubs gave a greater margin of error in giving me something to grab onto; oddly, riding itself was easier when the juggling took my focus. After months and months, I could go around the park twice — about eight tenths of a mile — in just under twenty minutes, without falling off, and without dropping a club. But it involved many, many falls, many drops, and many failures to mount the unicycle. All in public.

As I said, most people tried to ignore me, and seemed nervous about it. My assumption at the time is that they were nervous because I was being a freak, but what I failed to apprehend until much later was that there was in fact a deep respect they were giving me. They were embarrassed because I was doing something cooler than they were. There was one guy I got to know a little over the months; an older man, a recent immigrant from Russia named Mike. He was out power-walking, on the orders of a physician, I suppose, and we'd holler hello when we passed each other. But one day, he shouted as I passed, "Someday, I'm going to be doing that!"

Another day, a woman that I couldn't recall ever seeing before, strode past me and said, "We're all so proud of you!"

I had struggled for years to understand what circus really was; what it meant. What it did. I had tried to make juggling into acting and found that unless you're just going to make it into a metaphor, it's hard to make juggling be anything other than juggling. For example, unless you're an incredibly skilled mime, it's nearly impossible to use juggling as, say, a sword fight--because it requires so much overt cooperation between the two "fighters" that it can't usually look like a fight. The circus skills are just themselves; skills that most people won't attempt but love watching other people do. But they don't accomplish anything. They can't tell a story, other than "person X executes this trick," which is not drama. It's spectacle.

But it was the experience of learning to ride the unicycle — and failing often — in public that gave me an understanding of how circus performance functions: by displaying a transcendent skill, risking failure (and often death), circus performers provide inspiration for the audience, by transcending what is normally assumed to be human nature. By transcending their apparent humanity. And people usually just chalk it up to talent: the circus performer has some intangible gift (an inborn transcendence) that makes them special. One other person who did talk to me was a man who coached a girls' tennis team on the park's courts; he told me, "my girls sure think you're talented." I was flattered, but somehow upset; later I wished I had had the presence to tell him, "Tell them that it's not talent. It's skill, that anyone can learn. The important thing is to do what you love and work hard at it." That would have been good coaching.

I do think that there are some circus performers who may have, say, more inborn flexibility that allows them to become contortionists. But I suspect that anyone who starts stretching young enough and strenuously enough — and is willing to injure themselves in the way contortionists do — could be that kind of performer. It's their intention and their ability to work and learn that separates them from the pack. And it is this sacrifice that circus performers make which unites them with the tragic actor, in the way Nietzsche views tragic actors: as people who perform a self-sacrifice, in a public forum or liturgy, in order to recharge the life-force of the audience.

This was a long and unintended digression away from what I wanted to write about today, but since it cuts to the heart of what I'm really trying to do with my life out here, and why I called this blog Circo de Nada, I ran with it. I don't know why this powerful lesson that I learned in 1996 is something that I have failed to use, over and over again, in the years since. I don't know why the spirit of risk and discovery, and the day-by-day struggle for incremental improvement that I felt so powerfully back then was so lacking, say, in my thesis project. And I don't know why I always just assume everyone is going to scorn me when I display my humanity, instead of recognizing and respecting it.

I suppose we all had enough humiliation in Middle School to explain that. And some of the public does want performers to fail, so they can laugh with scorn — from a safe distance. But the majority of the public wants to see wonderful things, which most of them won't do for themselves. And the job I've declared for myself is to do those wonderful things.

I'm going to write more about challenge and risk, and the events of this trip, very soon.

The struggle for this Blog

Folks,

A lot of extraordinary things have happened since the last time I wrote. Apologies to the one or two of you who are checking this regularly (thanks, Mom and Dad!) but it has been a bewildering time and while I clearly could use a little more discipline with sitting down to write, I haven't always been sure what I would be writing about, or even how to write it. I'm working hard on it now,though, and will have some posts in the next couple of days. Promise.

Life is messy...

20 February

Any idea how hard it is to find an eye doctor in Campinas? I found a place to buy frames really quickly; it's right around the corner from where I'm living. But the phone number they gave me for an ophthalmologist didn't work; Henrique ended up driving me around the neighborhood of the university, asking at pharmacies and other businesses until we found one. As we arrived, the receptionist was just heading out to lunch, and wouldn't be back until after my class started. So Henrique took her card and made the appointment for me. Later this morning, he's going to drive me to it. What a guy! He says he knows what it's like to be in a strange place with no one to help... All my housemates here have been incredibly generous. They haven't let me make lunch or dinner for myself once yet. And they're going to take me to a club for some "velha guarda" roda de samba tonight. Amazing.

As for the workshop, my concentration and ease was better yesterday, but I'm still not really in the groove of the dance. I find that I can't concentrate on dance and the Portuguese language all at once; so when the instructors are talking about the dance, I either have to tune them out, simply observe what they do and try to copy it, in a kinaesthetic way, or focus so hard on what they're saying that I lose track of my legs. It's frustrating. And the dance just isn't in my legs yet — when we're improvising in a circle I have a hard time taking a cue and immediately beginning to just dance. Very frustrating.