Anne Bogart says, in Now You Act
“There is really no need to come up with anything new. Redescribing what you have inherited will engender all the novelty and originality you crave.”
“In trying we attempt a miracle.”
“If the motivation for action does not transcend the desire for fame and success the quality of the results will be inferior.”
“To signal in the face of the ephemeral is an act of heroism.”
A letter from the artist Mica Sigourney to the cast of Masterwork:
Friends,
It is not your job to succeed. It your job to attempt the tasks I set before you with enthusiasm. If you do not succeed at the task and it is my intention that you do succeed I have given you the wrong task, if you do not fail at the task and it is my intention that you fail then I have given you the wrong task. Your job is simply to do what I ask with commitment and focus. Your opinion of the work is not a concern, it is however a source of energy that you can utilize within the work. Your feelings about the work is not a concern, though they are energy that you can utilize within the work. When you arrive to rehearsal you may bring with you whatever you want, be it your frustrations at public transportations, joy at a new love interest, boredom, tiredness, fear, but you must not explain these things, you must not become them either, you may ride them or you may dispose of them. But the saying of these things is not of concern, it is unimportant. Do note however where you begin and the ways in which you travel away from that beginning. We are not here to reach the top of the mountain we expect to see, we are here to find out if there is a mountain there at all.
Pay attention and apply yourself with abandon, and with focus. Know that your success or failure is in my hands and is my responsibility alone.”
Share This!
More Good Stuff
Unsettled/Soiled Group is a group of East, Southeast, and South Asian diasporic movers, makers, and settlers on Ramaytush and Chochenyo Ohlone land. Unsettled/Soiled Group is led by June Yuen Ting, one of CounterPulse's 2022 ARC Performing Diaspora artists and will debut Dwelling for Unsettling alongside VERA!'s Try, Hye!, Thursday through Saturday, December 8-10 & 15-17, 2022
VERA! (they/them) is a queer Armenian American drag king, dancer, and community activist. They are one of CounterPulse's 2022 ARC Performing Diaspora artists and will debut Try, Hye! alongside Unsettled/Soiled Group's Dwelling for Unsettling, Thursday through Saturday, December 8-10 & 15-17, 2022
-
Inspired by ancestral, community-centered, and spiritual relationships to land and plants, [and then we must be] by Audrey Johnson is a research and ritual project honoring Black American practices with land and plants through the modes of food, farming, rootwork, and magic. The work honors the practices that get passed down through recipe, spell, and story, as well as the memories active and activated in the body, plants, the land (soil, clay, mycelium, strata), and in spirit.
