Tag: theatre

Crooked Fool: The answer is not closing the door

Cydney Marie Leave a comment

When I  started physical theatre school a year after having basically my entire spine surgically relocated, one of my classmates was quick to say, “When we study Commedia Dell’arte, there will be certain things you can’t do. You probably couldn’t do Arlecchino.”

For context, Arlecchino is a stock character known for acrobatics and over the top physicality.

I did eventually play Arlecchino. I ultimately found a character I felt more at home with, but I still did it.

To be honest, that comment pissed me off. I put that Arlecchino mask on out of pure spite. It also pisses me off when I struggle to nail a dance skill because of my back and somebody says “just don’t do that one.” Or when I go to a yoga class and somebody finds out my spine is full of metal and held together with rope, and they automatically recommend an easier class.

I want to make this very clear: when somebody with a medical condition, disability, or any other need tries to do something, the answer should never be “just don’t do it.” They should never be sent out of the room. The choice to participate in an activity is theirs, not yours.

The answer to a theatre student healing from a back surgery is not to deny them the opportunity to learn the same things as everyone else. The answer to somebody who needs an accommodation to play a character is not that they shouldn’t play that character.

Creative spaces have evolved to be exclusive. Our culture has historically included Disabled folks from public life, including the arts, so industry norms have not evolved to meet diverse needs. When we send somebody away because their bodies or minds don’t meet our standards, we are perpetuating that exclusion. We become the oppressors.

When I push back against meeting access needs in performing arts spaces, I hear a lot of “we can’t compromise our creative vision” or “it has to be this way.” But…does it really? Or is that just what’s easiest for those who hold power in the space? Just because something is doesn’t mean it has to be.

Excluding someone does not preserve creativity. To paraphrase disability activists Terry Galloway and Donna Marie Nudd, what it actually does is demonstrate that you are not or do not want to be creative enough to come up with a solution. If we can make an entire show from scratch, we can problem solve.

I am a stubborn person and I show up in a lot of spaces where people aren’t expecting someone like me, and sometimes where they don’t want me. And I won’t leave to make things easier on those who don’t have to question whether they belong in the space.  I value creativity too much to throw it out like that.

Crooked Fool: Flopping around like a dying fish until you accidentally make a thing

Cydney Marie Leave a comment

I’m working on a solo clown show and it is killing me.

              It’s actually a clown show with some added baggage in the form of a critical eye toward depictions of disability and Madness in comedy. While that does have me worrying a bit more about the messaging and content of the show, it’s not the main reason I’m struggling.

              I do think that part of the problem is that clown is out of my comfort zone. I’ve had some training and I’ve been told I’m at least not terrible at it, but I’d be much more comfortable writing something really sad with some beautiful language. But the catalyst for this entire show was frustration with the fact that no one could tell me why there were so many depictions of hunchbacks in comedy, which led to a rabbithole on disability in clown imagery, which leads us to this damn clown show.

              Ultimately, though, the problem here is just that I’m making a show from scratch with a deadline and it kind of sucks. I think it will get done. It’ll probably be fine. But creating a new work from nothing is not the same thing as figuring out how to embody a story that already exists. And it’s not as simple as putting words on a page. It’s more like flopping around like a dying fish until you accidentally make a thing. And that’s stressful when you don’t know when the “accidentally making a thing” part will happen.

              In my case, I had something of a breakthrough this week, so even though I’m still daunted by everything I still have to figure out, I can kind of see the light at the end of the tunnel now. But I’m still feeling the crunch. And I need a nap.

              Honestly, though, I do think this space of unknown is kind of to be expected when you’re making something new. I also think we aren’t always honest with ourselves about how frustrating it can be.

              We live in a world driven by deadlines, reliability, and not wasting people’s time. While I can see the value of these things in certain instances, let’s be clear that these are capitalist constructs, and more so than that, they aren’t realistic 100% of the time. Making stuff can be messy and it can be infuriating. I think there’s room to have grace with ourselves. I also think we can be more compassionate with the expectations we place on each other.

              That’s it. That’s all I’ve got. Whatever I manage to come up with show-wise will go up in the Keene in a few weeks. More info to come.

Crooked Fool: I love theatre, but it has some problems…

Cydney Marie Leave a comment

“Why do you do theatre?”

I’ve heard a lot of answers to this question. For me, a lot of it comes down to the way the artform pushes us to trust our own instincts and explore heightened states of being. There’s also a humanizing element to live performance that I think is incredibly powerful. But one answer that I hear over and over, and one that also holds true for me, is community. It’s being an integral part of an ensemble and being fully seen by both the cast and crew and the audience.

A couple of years ago, I was fully, 100% ready to quit theatre for good. I was tired of the rigid hierarchies, of petty politics and fragile egos, and of being told that my basic needs had no place in the rehearsal space. When I eventually dipped a reluctant toe back in, it was the feeling of community and being wanted that brought me back.

At the same time, that particular production  was laden with the same tempers, toxicity, and director’s-desires-over-human-needs mentality that made me want to quit in the first place.

Theatre is one of those places people go to feel seen and to be part of something. At its best, it’s a place where people can be valued and welcome and exist in wholeness in ways they can’t elsewhere. I do believe that theatre is sacred.

But that doesn’t mean we have to cling fearfully and unquestioningly to its norms and power structures.

Ideologies that tell us to “leave our baggage at the door” and that the “show must go on” regardless of our needs deny us humanity. They insist that our main value is to the show and that our value and needs as people are secondary. In denying accommodations for needs, these ways of thinking can also become incredibly ableist, and even if accommodations are given with relatively little pushback, the labor of getting needs met still falls disproportionately on the marginalized and minoritized people in the room.

We all know that commitment and heightened expression are hallmarks of theatre, and they do have tremendous power to elevate a scene and affect an audience. But no human being can be at 100% plus all the time. Perhaps this is a byproduct of a late-stage capitalist society that doesn’t appropriately value or fund the arts, but thespians don’t always get a lot of rest. On top of juggling day jobs and the realities of gig work, we’re expected to come and do sometimes demanding emotional and physical work for hours more on top of everything else. Where’s the conversation about balance? And where’s the respect for varying capacities? If somebody has a health condition or even just life circumstances that limit their capacity to explore that 100 every moment of rehearsal, are we just going to write them off as a bad actor and take away their place in the industry? All that does is lose us good storytellers, and closing out unique talents and perspectives just limits the craft as a whole.

And then there are the hierarchies. The egos. Maybe it is actually a good idea to listen if your stage manager says “places,” but is it also great to not be able to question the director if they’re offering a potentially harmful or problematic interpretation of a story? Or what if a direction is being given that isn’t possible to follow, whether for reasons of ability, mental/emotional health, or because it increases marginalization of the actors or the characters? We probably all have blind spots, but that’s why we have to be accountable to each other and continually do the work to educate ourselves. Not everyone steps up and does that work, and even for those who do, we’re human. We can’t know everything and we always have to be open to learning, and that’s especially true for those of us with privileged identities.

Theatre itself may be powerful and sacred, but it’s just as corrupted as anything else by the colonized, carceral, capitalist society we live in. Questioning rigid norms is not a disservice to the artform, it is the ultimate form of respect. Taking steps to ensure that every artist in the room can show up in wholeness and complexity, without erasing any part of themselves, maintains integrity in storytelling and ensures that valuable voices are not shut out of the room. Ignoring needs only prevents people from accessing their full potential. The greatness of theatre is dependent not on upholding every industry norm, but on asking tough questions about what the artform is capable of and how our unwillingness to change may be holding it back.

Theatre is absolutely a place where people can go to be whole, seen, and part of a community, but that only remains true if we commit to keeping it so the same way we commit to our objectives onstage. Examining power structures and community norms based in scarcity, unnecessary urgency, and privilege does not diminish excellence, it is a commitment to it. When we hold power in the room, whether because of our identities or our role in the production, we have the responsibility to put checks on that power, and doing so serves both the production and the theatre communities we love and that love us back. But that does mean stepping into the discomfort of questioning entrenched industry practices. It’s hard, it’s uncomfortable, and in the case of directors or producers who prize compliance, it can even be a career risk, but it is necessary to keep theatre sacred.

Crooked Fool: Embracing the 10

Cydney Marie Leave a comment

“I’m sorry there was some…emotion there.”

Sentences like this one have been said to me in a variety of situations in recent years, usually in the context of some minor moment of tension. And in many cases, this response almost rubbed me the wrong way moreso than the original conflict.

Why are you apologizing for emotions? We can apologize for our behavior or the way we respond to things, but that’s not the same thing. Plus, why is expressing big emotions somehow offensive, or even more troublingly, some universal sign of mental instability? Why does feeling and showing the urgency, immediacy, and importance of something warrant our friends diagnosing us with various ailments and commenting on how “dysregulated” we are? While therapy and emotional intelligence can be beneficial and healing under the right circumstances, they aren’t meant to be weapons pointed at anything that’s mildly uncomfortable.

Emotional intelligence isn’t the same as emotional absence. We have them for a reason, and using them smartly and compassionately doesn’t necessarily mean using them less.

I was an Angry Kid, or at least that’s what I was constantly told. My emotions were simply too big and implied that, at best, there was something a bit wrong with me mentally or, at worst, I was just a bad, angry person. As an AFAB, femme-presenting person, you could argue that this was mostly just misogyny. Since I’ve spent most of my life with a visible deformity, and since deformity is often equated with villainy in media and the arts, you could argue it was ableism. But whatever the underlying reason, it was a form of hatred. It was exclusion, meant to reinforce the notion that my emotions made me bad and that I needed to be punished into controlling them, cutting off their sharp edges, in order to be worthy of love. I needed to fit in the box and follow the rules, and if I couldn’t do that, I was Bad.

I’ve struggled for years to articulate what drew me to theatre in those early days, but one thing I remember vividly is how freeing it felt to be able to fly up to a 10 on the emotional scale and be praised for it. Onstage, the 10 is encouraged, a necessary use of energy to draw the audience into energetic proximity. Though they know we’re just telling a story, heightened emotion shows immediacy, need, scale, stakes – it shows that the events taking place, real or imagined, are worth drawing up our vital force and setting it loose, pushing it beyond us. And if it’s worth it to us, maybe it should be worth it to them.

This is why live performance has so much power. It’s a sharing of life force in proximity and a declaration that there is something out there worth physically putting ourselves out there for.

Theatre has its problems, at least as it exists in a late-stage capitalist, colonized society. But it makes space for big personalities and big emotions. More than that, it cultivates them, training them into us because of the power that they have to move a room, to cause someone’s breath to catch, to break skin out in goose bumps, focus soul power through glaring eyes, and zing urgent, world altering energy into fingertips, twitching them into action.

And sometimes we need the 10 even in life. Big emotions are there for a reason. Sometimes that reason is change.

What is worth your 10? Where will you lend your vital life force? Which story will you let breathe fully into your living body in the years to come? When is it worth exhausting yourself and getting angry if it leads to change?

We can’t live every moment of our lives at a 10, but sometimes we are called to it, and we have to be ready to draw upon ourselves in fullness when that call comes. Villainizing our heightened, most powerful selves will only serve to keep us quiet when it counts the most.

Crooked Fool: Haunted

Cydney Marie Leave a comment

I went to an audition the day I turned 21. The callback involved a series of writing prompts for ultra-short plays lasting around 2 minutes. They could be many things, but they had to be true.

I ended up turning in a couple of plays about how I’d grown up in a strange old house that I’d always thought was haunted. Those callback pieces ended up turning into a series of close to 100 ultra-short plays, mixed and matched in various combinations during performance, where I tried to understand what ghosts were and whether they were real.

From Ghosts: Vol. 8 –

Do you hear the sighs, the groans

The songs

The cries

The footsteps

You can imagine them if you need to

It shouldn’t make a difference

I never did come up with any kind of concrete answer. Instead, I came to a place where I was more comfortable living in the gray. Odds are, no one will ever be able to definitively prove that ghosts exist, but what difference does that really make when we’re experiencing their effects? When something is haunting us, does it really matter whether we can prove to the world that it fits some kind of socially constructed definition of what counts as real, or does it matter that, for one reason or another, something is crying out for us to hear?

Vol. 8 –

You can try ignoring them

Good luck

You can close your ears and your mind

But the voices will shine through

In your empathy

Your convictions

Your hesitations

Looking ahead at what may be a dark, heavy time in my life and in our collective story, I’ve been thinking a lot about what ghosts may be haunting us right now. What unfinished business and half-learned lessons are we being forced to pay attention to? What stories from the past are looping back around with renewed urgency and vitality?

I don’t know the answer yet. We’ll have to wait and see. But whether we’re talking about spirits, stories, or something else difficult to grasp, we’re staring down a very charged, very haunted time. And even more so than listening to the haunting voices already there, I think we need to start figuring out what makes it worth it for us to cry out in the night. I feel this especially keenly as an artist.

From Ghosts: Vol. 4 –

What if the inspiration gnawing at us is really ghosts trying to get us to use their stories—now our stories—to try and fix things.  The only problem is, if we fail, their unfinished business becomes ours.

We are entirely made up of stories. Everything up to this point has collided, combined, grown, and evolved to make us, and this is true of everything from our DNA to the life stories that ensured our existence. The ghosts screaming at us in the night are reminding us not to forget that their stories have become our stories, and that these stories are not over. They continue with us. And sometimes we have to change them.

Stories hold immense power. They are not some frivolous thing that we use to entertain kids. They govern our lives. The stories we tell ourselves determine how we live our lives – what roles do I fill? What kind of person am I? Where am I going? Where did I begin? Where do I think I’ll end?

From Ghosts: Vol. 9 –

I am truly starting to wonder if I don’t exist and I’m just a bunch of ghosts trying to coexist in one broken body.

And the thing is, no one person owns these stories. We are all keepers, and there’s a constant push and pull of narratives happening. Stories are shared. The collective narratives a society has exerts more control over it than any government or police state. And because we are born into stories that have lived much longer than we have, there are plot points present that may not serve us. So how can we harness the power of the stories that govern our lives?

How will the story change with us?

Vol. 8 –

The odds are high

That your job will also be unfinished

It is likely that you will be

The creak, the groan, the hum, the sigh, the cry, the singer

The maker of footsteps in the night

You will be the noise

That jolts children out of their bed saying

“Something is not right”

If the story we tell ourselves is that everything is fine, everything will stay exactly as it is. For better or worse. Nothing will be rectified. But if we tell ourselves that the current story is an injustice, that it’s harmful, that it’s wrong, there’s at least a chance that it will change. Changing the story is step one for justice.

And this is the reason they’re so afraid of artists. We challenge stories. We take them, embody them, make things beautiful that were not meant to be so that they can’t look away. We can look on a stage, or in a book, or see a movie, or take in a painting, and we see ourselves. We see what we do and don’t want to be and the kind of life we want to have. And divinity is having the power to change your path. That’s the power we have.

From Ghosts: Vol. 9 –

The purpose of light is not to banish and conquer demons, to burn them with holy water, to send them to a place of eternal torture… Light walks face first into literal hell holes and tears open portals to the other side so that no one is silenced. Light sets fires in the middle of the night to make absolutely fucking sure that nobody misses the dangerous, spectacular burning flames…Light is fucking pissed right now. 

So as we step into what may well be a dark, heavy, and uncertain time, how do we honor the ghosts that keep us up at night? How do we hear the beauty in their howls and take on their unfinished business as our own? There is power here. How do we claim it?

Vol. 9 –

We are creatures of light. But that doesn’t mean we live in the light.

If we are headed for a revolution, it will start and end with us. No one will fight a war they don’t believe in, but they’ll risk it all if they think it’s worth it. People are powerful like that. And wars start and end with stories.

Artists were not put on this Earth as a fun addendum to the important stuff. We were put here to ensure that everyone stands a chance. It is our job to make sure that every screaming ghost is heard.

From Ghosts: The Final Volume –

I am sending you forth into the darkness. To be witnesses, to be storytellers, be burning flames in the pitch black. Walk in darkness always.

So no matter what happens next, we haunt. And we will not be silenced.

From Vol. 8 and Vol. 9 –

Are you angry yet?

Crooked Fool: Theatre is grind culture is ableism.

Cydney Marie 1 Comment

I have an old, faded bumper sticker on my car that reads, “I can’t. I have rehearsal.” I’m sure it was given to me as a gift, though I can’t remember when or by whom. I do remember laughing when I first held it in my hands, mostly out of genuine mirth, understanding the joke, but partially also out of ruefulness.

Though there were a few earlier experiences with middle school classes and the like, I first became involved in theatre “for real” when I was 14 and attending Interlochen Arts Academy. On top of a 9-hour school day, I was expected to complete multiple large projects each semester, complete a certain number of community service hours, attend mandatory performances, rehearse for my own performances, and practice classical guitar on a regular basis, all in addition to the typical high school homework. I can’t remember for sure if this was ever explicitly said, but it very much seemed like we were being prepared to work at this level indefinitely “out in the real world.” And I have. My work ethic changed as a result of my time there, and even some grad students I know marvel at the kind of schedule I often keep.

In part because the arts are so undervalued and underfunded in the US, many of us cannot fund our lives through our hard-earned creative skills alone. Perhaps Interlochen was preparing me for the reality that I’d likely have to hold down a fulltime survival job in addition to any creative work that I wanted to do. If that was the case, they’re unfortunately probably right. Having dipped my toe into the world of professional theatre, that is in fact what I and just about everyone I know has had to do.

But the failings of late-stage American capitalism aside, we need to take a breath when it comes to the emphasis placed on work ethic. It’s not healthy for anybody, but when it’s also slamming the door in the faces of Disabled artists.

In theatre, I was taught to accept a 3-hour rehearsal after an 8-hour workday for weeks on end. I was conditioned never to consider adding a conflict after the rehearsal schedule had been posted, whether the reason was an unexpected family obligation or a debilitating migraine. I was taught to ignore bodily needs, pain, and exhaustion if they were going to in any way alter the flow of rehearsal.

I can remember a show I did when I was 16 where I was asked to stand at attention onstage for a large portion of the show, which set off days of back pain. I finally gave in and asked the director if I could kneel down during rehearsal. He agreed, but no mention was ever made of altering the blocking so that I wouldn’t be in pain, and I didn’t dare ask. At the time, I accepted pain as something I would have to put up with in order to put on a good show. “The show must go on” and I would have to “leave my baggage at the door.”

A solid decade later, my perspective has changed, and I’m gonna call it: that shit is ableist.

When we demand this level of grind from artists, on top of reducing their bodies to value-making cogs in a capitalist machine (even if the machine is gloriously creative), we are making tacit assumptions that all bodies have the same capabilities and use energy the same way. We assume that if something is hard, but doable for me, and doesn’t cause too much damage to my body, then it must be true for someone else. And by refusing to make accommodations, we’re basically saying that if a body can’t get with this overwhelming program, they don’t deserve a spot in the room. Their point of view is eliminated from the crucial discourse we take part in through the arts, ensuring that dominant and often oppressive perspectives are never challenged. And if we assert that making rehearsal and performance spaces more accessible in some way erodes excellence, we’re not only laying bare our own lack of creativity and vision in coming up with solutions, we’re also asserting that disability-friendly theatre, and thereby Disabled perspectives, will always be less than.

Some years after that back pain-ridden production, I ended up going through major spinal surgery in the hopes of correcting the pain and visible spinal deformity that I’d dealt with for my first decade in theatre. Less than a year later, I began an intensive program in physical theatre at Dell’arte International. With class 9-5 every day, nightly rehearsals, and attendance policies that made it nearly impossible to take even a day to care for one’s body, I can see where some might question if that’s really the place for myself as a Disabled performer to be. But this, again, is actually a question of my right to make art, to make my perspective heard, and to use my body, Disabled or no, in the ways that I choose. If you’re saying that this space should not have accommodated me, what you’re actually saying is that I should not have the right to make theatre.

I ended up not only completing the program with flying colors, but being voted ensemble director by my peers. I was one of seven graduates that year. But by the end of the program, I was also reckoning with a difficult truth: the culture of theatre, as it stands now, is inherently ableist and would make no space for me. I spent a solid year after leaving the program genuinely thinking that I was going to have to throw in the towel on over a decade of work and stop performing. If I couldn’t push through pain and fatigue and beat my body into performing in ways that were convenient and desirable for able-bodied educators and directors, what hope was there?

Capitalism only values bodies if they can produce, and for this reason, bodies like mine are not valued. Sacred and ancient though it may be, theatre culture has, on the whole, also adopted this thinking. And in addition to denying Disabled artists a place at the table, this thinking reduces all bodies to their production capacity. An actor is not valued as a human being until they can get cast in a large production, satisfy their director, and bring in audience. And if I’m being honest, I’ve felt that dehumanization keenly even when disability was not the main issue I was experiencing during a show.

But what if we took accessibility as a creative challenge? And what if we decided to value the human beings in the room beyond their ability to keep a convenient rehearsal room and sell tickets? Doing these things does not erode the quality of theatre; in fact, taking on these new, innovative, creative challenges may serve to elevate the artform further. What possibilities have we stubbornly refused to explore?

I will be the first to say that theatre is sacred. But so am I. And you can’t make theatre without people.