Coming June 9th: Idylls at the C Street Arts Festival in Laurel

Weekend after this!
The Inaugural C Street Arts Festival
 (on C Street, in Laurel, Maryland 20707)


Laurel's new street festival includes a theatre tent, along with artists' exhibitions, music, food, and poetry.


Several Idylls will be presented throughout the day:


11:15 am.    Stephen Mead
in "A Street-Merchant Imagines his Riches to Come" 

(after an anonymous author of The Arabian Nights)

1:30 pm Idylls Sequence
Stephen Mead in "A Bandit Plots a Murder by the Road"
Sue Struve in "A Native Chief's Captive Woman Guards One Freshly Caught" 

(vide Jorge Luis Borges)

Stephen Mead in "A Reveler Walks Home to his Family by Moonlight"


 3:30 pm.  Harlie Sponaugle
in "A Mother Feels Her Estranged Daughter's Labor Pains"

(vide Colette)

Deborah Randall, founder of Venus Theatre, runs the Theatre Tent for this event;  many thanks to Deb for including the idylls in the line-up!

More Proof in Concept

On the one hand, my intentions with this project are artistic.

On the other, my artistic intentions overall refuse to make a distinction between the work and life - it all has to do with life, daily life as much as anything else, as much as anything highlighted or set off as "work," the art has to be inseparable from living, or what's the point...

Life, daily life, also Lifetime/the Aion, as it was formulated (with reference to Heraclitus) in my book Heraclitean Pride.

This is related to the idea of the idylls being able to be done anywhere;  the work can be done anywhere, suitable for proscenium or the street, in an embrace of the interplay of text, subtext, and context.

text (the work as its written)
subtext (meanings spoken and unspoken, tacit and explicit, while part of the role of performance is to engage and activate certain subtleties, ambivalences, and undercuttings here)
context (where art interacts with life, the surroundings, the moment, with potential to explode the given)

Anyways, Saturday (weekend before last, April 28th) was a wild ride.
That was the wrap up of CruMoPoPerFest in front of Waverly library in Baltimore, and Idylls performers had to contend with a number of truly exciting challenges, among them: threatening rain; loud drumming from the grassy median right across from them, where a local high school marching band raised money by holding buckets out to cars lined up at the traffic light; and, during what was almost a mellow period of the afternoon, a belligerent, incoherent, clearly mentally ill man shouting and trying to interfere with the performances.

Nevertheless, each performer was imperturbable, and even during the loudest part of the drumming, an inner circle of "performer-created performance space" held its own, the audience hanging in there, intent on the proceedings.  The day as a whole had a satisfying sense of rhythm to it.  Proof in concept, thanks to the skills, powers of concentration, and bare-stage presences of Genna Davidson, Sue Struve, and Stephen Mead.

I'll post pics, recordings, vids from the event, when they come in - I think we'll be receiving all three.

There was a phrase that jingled back and forth between Christophe Casamassima (as co-founder of Poetry in Community, one of the organizers of CruMoPoPerFest) and my 12-yr-old daughter, Hero.
(Hero was an active participant, learning beatboxing with Max Bent, and singing pop songs during open mic sessions, including - ! - Kelly Clarkson's treatment of the Nietzsche quote, "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger").   I'll pass along what Christophe repeated back to me by email last week...

This Saturday,

It may not have be

An Ideal environment

But it certainly was

An Idyll environment

So much fun. And sheer anxiety! Hope the actors had fun too.

Derived from street and marketplace theatre in ancient Greece, the idyll form creates its own ideal theatrical space; added to that, recently came across Guy Davenport's statement in his essay collection, Every Force Evolves a Form, that not only was this sort of theatre done in street, agora, and private homes (salons) - but also in what he describes as "wine shops"...  a relevant idea somehow, to keep in mind for another time  - wine and idylls...



 
As intriguing as Saturday was, the day before - a cold blustery Friday - Genna and I rehearsed her Antigone on the National Mall - this was Genna's intrepid idea, and it was incredibly instructive and favorable of possibility.  We were near the Smithsonian metro stop, in front of the Castle.  She did not perform, but rehearsed, and yet somehow that fact was communicated to passers-by - the issue of subtext and context again.  What were the cues that so unmistakably distinguished performance from rehearsal?  ...for further inquiry, intimately connected with the idylls theory and practice of performance, and spillage of art into life.

CruMoPoPerFest this Saturday in Baltimore - Idylls Line-Up

Exciting to be a part of this event:

7th Annual Cruellest Month Poetry and Performance Festival (CruMoPoPerFest)

Saturday, April 28th 11am-4pm
Baltimore's National Poetry Month Celebration wraps up
at the Waverly branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library
400 East 33rd Street, Baltimore Maryland 21218  
410-396-6053

Scenes from Idylls for a Bare Stage will be interspersed with open mic sets and a special performance by Outside the Box, an interactive exploration of the Elements of Music through beatboxing, led by Max Bent, Waverly resident and Young Audiences of Maryland Teaching Artist.

Performers Stephen Mead, Sue Struve, Harlie Sponaugle, and Genna Davidson (each profiled elsewhere in this blog - please check out the archives) present individual Idylls throughout the day.  Here's their schedule...

Idylls Line-Up

11:00 am. Stephen Mead
in "A Street-Merchant Imagines his Riches to Come" 

(after an anonymous author of The Arabian Nights)

Stephen Mead

12 noon. Idylls Sequence
Stephen Mead in "A Bandit Plots a Murder by the Road"
Sue Struve in "A Native Chief's Captive Woman Guards One Freshly Caught" 

(vide Jorge Luis Borges)

Stephen Mead in "A Reveler Walks Home to his Family by Moonlight"

Sue Struve

1:45 pm.  Harlie Sponaugle
in "A Mother Feels Her Estranged Daughter's Labor Pains"

(vide Colette)

Harlie Sponaugle

 2:30 pm. Genna Davidson 
in "Antigone Buries Her Brother's Body Against Orders of the King"

(after Sophocles)

Genna Davidson

Here's the complete schedule, with Idylls, Open Mic (sign-ups available throughout the day), and Max Bent's Outside the Box:

SPD and PiC: Strength of the Small Presses

Good news for Idylls for a Bare Stage:  Small Press Distribution accepted twentythreebooks as an SPD publisher, so soon the idylls book will be available through bookstores and outlets nationwide, and you'll be able to find it with my other published books at http://www.spdbooks.org

The SPD website is an excellent resource for readers to explore what's going on in independent publishing.

About the unparalleled level of support and dedication only possible through the small presses, one picture (even in a literary context) says it all.  I wasn't there, but here's twentythreebooks publisher Douglas Mowbray at  Baltimore's CityLit Festival - where else but with the indies can an author find such personal publisher attentiveness to a book?

Doug Mowbray with the Idylls in hand

And it goes beyond promotion and marketing, this attentiveness of people involved in the independent publishing world:  it starts, and follows through, and makes an end of itself of the creative process itself, with energies squarely pressed into the service of artistic values above all. Thus, with regard to such personal publisher involvement in the poetics and purposes of the work, Doug recently posted a quote about the Idylls from another publisher of mine, Christophe Casamassima. 

When the arts, the approaches to art, the interpretation of art—poesis, or the subjective—and the world in its totality of forms, genres, disciplines—the objective worldview—are in sync, then life and art disintegrate into ways of thinking and knowing. Idylls for a Bare Stage is the only book in which poetry, theatre, philosophy, philology, psychology, myth, history take precedence—an always spiraling inward precedence with no one discipline taking the foreground. No other book does this so eloquently and purposively. This is the soul of the Idylls—an exploration of knowing and how to know with the knower at the center point, struggling with being and meaning and what it is to know. It is not empirical. It is not quantifiable. And for the sake of students and humans everywhere, it’s time to unveil the cloak that keeps us rooted, no, subjugated, to the past. Let the Idylls open the way, compassionately and expansively.

-Christophe Casamassima, poet; proprietor, Furniture Press Books; co-founder, Poetry in Community

Acts and Words:  these are serious, energetic, outspoken instances of (multiple) publisher support for an author and the work - the intense take, interpretation and belief exhibited here are an above-and-beyond engagement with the book's artistic intention.  Nothing less has been my experience with both publishers as publishers, Mowbray for Idylls for a Bare Stage, and Casamassima for Heraclitean Pride and my soon-to-be-published book-length poem The Re-echoes.

The quote above was posted on a Facebook group page for Poetry in Community; and you can join the group on Facebook PiC page on Facebook; Mowbray and Casamassima worked together to create Poetry in Community, devoted to poetry as a way of life and living and knowing.  Or, as it says on the PiC page itself, "Poetry in Community will be both a physical center of activity (a meeting place, workshop, classroom, event space, library) and a virtual center of activity (web presence, catalogue, blog, forum) dedicated to creating and coordinating a community that will sustain the aesthetic and professional endeavors of emergent poets and publishers. Poetry in the Community will work with local communities—at the street, block, and neighborhood level—as a partner in community growth and sustainability efforts. Poetry in Community will create a more expansive tradition in which the whole of the community is invited to be present and represented. Poetry in Community will foster poetic practices as a collaborative effort to foster creative literacy and personal growth."

PiC is Baltimore-based, as are all of my publishers so far (although I'm based in the D.C. metro area):
Douglas Mowbray, twentythreebooks
Christophe Casamassima Furniture Press
and Justin Sirois (author of the Iraqi war novel Falcons on the Floor, just out!), Lauren Bender, and Jamie Gaughran-Perez, all three of Narrow House
I don't know what it is about Baltimore, but it has fostered an incredible scene for lit, and nourishing soil for what I do...

and so it's fitting The Idylls will come to Baltimore in a week and a half,
to wrap up the Cruellest Month Poetry and Performance Festival (CruMoPoPerFest)
on April 28th at the Waverly branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library
400 East 33rd Street, Baltimore Maryland 21218    11-4pm
I'll post the cast list and exact Idylls performance schedule soon...

Performer Profile: Stephen Mead

The Idylls project welcomes a new actor for April 28th, and beyond!

He is Stephen Mead, actor and entertainer trained in Britain, who brings to the work an expertise in monologue and one-man shows, plus an incredible talent for extensive and quick memorizing. 

Stephen will take on "A Street-Merchant Imagines his Riches to Come," my idyll from The Arabian Nights; also, I wouldn't be surprised if he masters "A Bandit Plots a Murder by the Road" and "A Reveler Walks Home to his Family by Moonlight" in time for the Baltimore show.  That's Saturday, April 28th, the final day of the CruMoPoPerFest (Cruellest Month Poetry and Performance Festival), with performances and readings outside, in front of the Waverly Branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library.  Starting at 11am.  400 East 33rd Street, Baltimore MD 21218.  More details to come.

Stephen Mead

Stephen (memorize first, ask questions later) Mead specializes in what he calls "dramatic recitations," mostly of Victorian-era writers, following his taste for Dickens and Poe. Recently he brought his one-man show celebrating the Dickens bicentennial to the Athenaeum here in Alexandria. In our work together, we have been exploring the commonality between what he has been doing for years and the approach I've developed for poetic monologues leading up to the publication of Idylls for a Bare Stage.  As outlined in the introduction to the book, my take on the form of the Idyll finds its roots in ancient Mime and street theater, while Stephen centers himself on English acting traditions as applied to the Victorian age, a time when audiences savored recitation (plus, he's made a special study of Sikes and Nancy, a book of Dickens' own adaptations of his prose for the very popular public readings he did in the latter half of his life). The two techniques converge - Stephen's dramatic recitations and the actors' approach developed for Idylls - in the way charged language gets treated in an almost tactile fashion, intent on immersion in the Word Alive, audience-performer mutual imagination, with virtuosity of utterance embraced as a uniquely fascinating element of live performance.

In short, I'm thrilled to be working with Stephen Mead, an actor who has been described as a "master" for his Dogberry in Much Ado...

More from his bio:
STEPHEN MEAD
Actor/Singer/Storyteller//Recitalist
DRAMATIC RECITATIONS (from memory)
From the works of DICKENS, EDGAR ALLAN POE
And other authors
Victorian Music-hall and Ballads, Victorian Evenings

STEPHEN MEAD trained as an actor at London’s Royal Academy of
Dramatic Art. Besides appearing in many stage productions, he has worked
as a drama adviser to Goldcrest Films UK and written for Channel4 (TV).
Stephen has made a specialty of DRAMATIC RECITATIONS (from
memory) from the works of DICKENS, EDGAR ALLAN POE and other
19th-century authors. These bring poems and prose by these writers to vivid
life without costume, make-up, lights or scenery, Most 19th-century
literature was written to be heard as well as read, and Stephen Mead’s
enthralling renditions of these pieces have gripped audiences in the UK and
the US since 1987.

Stephen has worked for London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, the National
Arts Collection Fund, the National Trust (UK), Richmond Adult College,
Missenden Abbey Buckinghamshire, among many other venues. He has
appeared on the bill of the world-famous Player’s Theatre in London
singing Victorian music-hall. Stephen had the honour of being invited to
perform his one-man adaptation of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” at
the Dickens Festival in Dickens’ home town Rochester, Kent, in the historic
Guildhall three years in a row. He also performed a tour of Switzerland
under the auspices of the Anglo-Swiss society and appeared with singer
Stacey Earle in a coast-to-coast tour of the USA.

Upcoming, April in Baltimore: CruMoPoPerFest

Several Idylls will be performed outdoors in Baltimore for the 7th Annual Cruellest Month Poetry and Performance Festival (CruMoPoPerFest).  Please Check out all the events for this festival in the announcement below.

Meanwhile, my gracious neighbors, Helga and Allan Abramson, gave a "salon" in their home for Idylls last weekend.  It was great fun, guests regaled by our hosts with delicious sweets and expertly brewed teas.  I look forward to posting what pics come in, of the party and of the performance.

Sue Struve performed "A Native Chief's Captive Woman Guards One Freshly Caught." (Please check out her profile and photos of her in action elsewhere in this blog).

Sue Struve

The form of the Idyll is versatile, intended to be so, in that it can be performed anywhere, congruent with its ancient history:  theatre easily done on the street, in the marketplace, and in private homes.  So it was proved this weekend, with regards to in-home performances! - thanks to Sue in her masterful rendering of the Captive Woman, and thanks to Helga and Allan in their hosting.  (And we'll have our shot at street and sidewalk in the Waverly neighborhood of Baltimore next month.)  The intimate setting of the Abramson's living room brought everyone into a circle of intensity generated by Sue's performance.  There was something particularly resonant with this piece in that setting.  Here was an indoor, quiet, quite civilized gathering - game enough to enter into a shared imagining of this savage wild Mindscape, an idyll concluding with, "Pretty soon you won't ever again be able to live within hard walls."

In Others' Words: Idylls as Book, and as Approach to Acting

Now that Idylls for a Bare Stage is out, a definite shift has occurred with regard to "releasing" the work:  from creating and doing performances off a manuscript, and towards the publication of the book, to... the book itself, vehicle for the Idyll idea and form, both on the page and in its activation off the page for performance.

Here's how others - interactive with the project along the way - have taken the work...


On the book itself:

Magnus has performed his versions of Heraclitus as multi-voiced, choral readings improvised from texts by performers and audience, as texts to be read with musicians, and as philosophy in his book Heraclitean Pride.   In this volume, he presents “Idylls”, a form originated by the Greek poet Theocritus.   These are not idylls as pastoral, rustic poems, but, as Magnus describes in his introduction:  “street theater for daily life, skits done anywhere, solo performers and small groups of actors as part of the activity of the marketplace.  Scenes of daily life, in daily life.”   These idylls, versions of Theocritus, Sophocles and St. Francis, and stories inspired by Whitman, Colette, and Borges, can be read as poems, or performed as dramatic monologues.    M. brings a poet’s feeling for the texture of language to these dramatic works so that each character speaking a monologue uses a unique vocabulary and unique speech rhythms.   He opens with a sorceress and ends with the mythical inventor of the alphabet, taking us from magic incantations to the magic of writing.   Magnus has given us rich, evocative texts, ripe for private reading or public performance.

                                           - Chris Mason, author of Hum Who Hiccup, member of TheTinklers, Old Songs, and Coo Coo Rockin' Time


And on the Idylls as theatre, along with specific acting approaches tailored for the form and useful for any poetically-charged performances, as described and theorized in the book's introduction, and as developed in hands-on workshops by the author (the performers quoted engaged the workshop techniques with me, and went on to perform the pieces in contexts described earlier in this blog):

The words that Magus has crafted into idylls are so rich and joyous to speak that there are endless possibilities for experiencing their inherent power.

It has been invaluable for me to work without an end in sight and to work so deeply and one-on-one with this text, with Magus, and with myself. It's freeing for me to have a consistent practice and continuous work. Now I'm not just working when I land a job or for the next audition, but towards infinite opportunity to stand-up and perform a poetic monologue for anyone who might be available to watch and listen.

The concept of monologue as performance, not just performance within a larger script or as something to use at an audition, but as self-contained artwork gives me confidence as an actress. I'm not sure I can explain the significance of this idea, but I see sunlight when I think about it. Perhaps reasserting the monologue as performance gives me a sense of creative control over a form of acting that is often termed loathsome, annoying, arduous, and impossible to wrangle.

The technique's emphasis on being present with everyone and everything in the performance space has been supremely important to me.  In my experience "stage presence" is theater vocabulary often given short shrift when learning how to act. It is tricky for the actor to both completely imbibe the surroundings, allowing impulses to enter and leave without blocking, altering or suspending them, and then simultaneously craft a visceral experience fully manifest in a different time & place. A shameless spirit of imagination must takeover and pull the actor from moment to moment without hesitation. And every step of the way, the imagination is fed by the power of the words which given freedom to move will work magic on their audience.

                                                               -Genna Davidson, actress/musician/puppeteer

Working with Magus on his idyll, "A Mother Feels her Estranged Daughter's Labor Pains," has been a revelation for me. Numerous directors have told me that I don't need to "do" so much when I'm on stage, but they never really explained what they meant. Using Magus' approach of focusing on the power and expressive potential of the words, and working with his beautifully crafted poetic monologue, I've learned how to immerse myself in the river of words and let them carry me through a thoroughly honest and moving performance. I've used an excerpt from the idyll for several auditions, and each performance has evoked a thoughtful response from the auditors beyond the usual "thank you."

                                                                               - Harlie Sponaugle, Actress/Singer

  As an actor, working with Magus has opened my eyes to the raw power inherent in the text. When I focus on the sound of the words, I bring life to their meaning. Playing with pace, volume, and emphasis frees up my voice and moves me away from dry analysis. His body and voice exercises calm me and prepare me to genuinely embrace my surroundings and the audience. I find that as the text begins to breathe, my imagination is released and I become open to discoveries about my character. Magus has developed an approach that has transformed the way I work on a role. It will infuse energy and power into any performer's work.

                                                                                         - Sue Struve, D.C.-area Actor

This approach to acting has been incredibly empowering.  The ideas of embracing the audience and embracing yourself as a performer free you from worrying about naturalism and lets you savor the poetry of powerful language, giving you and the audience a heightened sense of what's possible.  As an actor you can feel the audiences imaginations feeding you and letting you take a fresh journey with the material each time.   So often we want to shut out the reality of the performance, but by embracing it, we are empowered to actually create a greater reality on stage and an exuberant experience for audience and performer.  It has freed me as an actor more than any exercise or method I have ever tried.

                                                                                         - Rachel Morrissey, actress/storyteller