Tag: theatre

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.

Crooked Fool: Who are the “real” artists?

Cydney Marie Leave a comment

I recently closed a professional, devised show in Detroit. For anyone who isn’t familiar with this type of theatre, it basically involves a group of performers building an original show from the ground up, often utilizing games and improvisation. When we were rehearsing one day, I started moving along with a poem being read by another performer.

And then the question came: are you a dancer?

And oof, that’s a tough one.

So first of all, because I am stubborn, yes. In small part due to a random smattering of dance classes, mostly in adulthood, and in much larger part due to some pretty extensive physical theatre training, I have a degree of body awareness and creativity, and I move to express beauty and tell stories. So yes, I dance.

But that’s not what I told them.

“It’s complicated.”

I’ve taken some dance classes. I’ve tried out a lot of styles. I’ve done some work developing stamina, flexibility, and somatic awareness. But, despite the way I think about my own identity as an artist, I’m also keenly aware that there are plenty of people – many of them dancers – who would not view that label as accurate.

As a child, my dance training was limited to a few classes at the Y. I did not spend years in ballet or modern technique classes learning the correct ways to position my feet or perfecting my placement. Instead, when the theatres all closed during the pandemic and I ended up with a bunch of free time on my hands, I started taking adult dance classes. It started with various hip hop styles, such as popping, locking, and breaking, then branched into the somewhat scarier and certainly more daring circus arts, like silks, pole dancing, and parkour, before coming back down to Earth with styles like modern and contemporary. Even now, if somebody tried to verbalize some kind of choreography to me, it’s still a crapshoot whether I’ll have any idea what they’re talking about. Though it’s worth noting that I can do quite a lot if somebody explains movements in terms of body mechanics instead of dance vocabulary.

So, this time, I’ll pose the question to you: am I a dancer? Can I call myself a dancer if I didn’t spend my entire childhood learning technique and then ideally perfecting it in college? If my aesthetic is less “point your toes” and more “let’s try this weird thing and see if it looks cool?”

There’s a lot at stake in this question. How should I think of myself artistically? What are the “right” labels?

But most importantly: who gets to call themselves an artist?

Because if the only people who get to be artists are those who can afford thousands of hours of classes and do things the “right” way according to the standards of the dominant culture, that’s a really big problem.

First: how many hours of dance classes does it take to perfect the minutiae of technique? And more importantly, how many people can afford that many dance classes? As a kid, I sure couldn’t. I don’t necessarily think that there’s anything wrong with learning technique in dance or any art form. There’s definitely some benefit to have more tools to pull from when creating. But I do think there’s something inherently elitist and exclusionary in saying that there’s only one right way to create, and that only those with enough money and resources are allowed access.

The some obvious unfairness to telling people that if they can’t afford “real” training, they can’t be artists. But there’s an even bigger problem: by telling people that only those who can afford extensive training get to be “real” artists, we’re ensuring that art remains a domain only for the wealthy and powerful.

Narratives govern our lives. Tsubasa Yamaguchi famously said, “Art is a language without words,” and I’m inclined to agree. Because we can say more through the arts than we might be able to with words alone, making and sharing art in its various forms allows us the chance to challenge dominant narratives. If we tell ourselves the story that everything’s fine, nothing will change. But if we can alter the story we tell ourselves to say that change needs to happen, there’s some chance that it actually will. People will only try to change things if they believe something is wrong. Change the story, change reality.

So here’s the thing: if only the privileged make art, privileged narratives are perpetuated.

Part of moving towards a more just world is being open to expanding our ideas of what counts as normative, good, and beautiful. And in all of these cases, but particularly in regard to beauty, the arts have a unique ability to challenge entrenched ways of thinking and help us to see beauty in new places. By taking away the gatekeeping around what counts as a “real” artist, we allow more people the chance to challenge narratives that fail to acknowledge the beauty and goodness in those who don’t fit our reductionistic, colonized ideas of who “deserves” or has “earned” these labels, based either on having inherent traits that are favored, or by developing normative traits through conformity and compliance.

So what does it mean to tell me that I’m not a dancer? To say that because I move differently than I might if I had trained in more conventional ways from childhood, my body can never fit within the imposed parameters? What does it mean that my body, ever crooked due to scoliosis and sometimes uncooperative due to chronic illness, will never hold itself the exactly the way a dancer body “should?” If I can’t dance right, should I never dance at all?

Movement has been my primary means of managing chronic pain for years, and for this reason among many others, I refuse to believe that my identity as a creative mover, a researcher of my own body, as a DANCER should be locked up in an ivory tower that I can only access if I force my non-normative body to behave itself and cough up money and resources that I don’t have. Because then my body would just be another “weird,” “ugly” body that would never get to move at all. Movement should not be a privilege reserved for the white, cis, straight, or able-bodied.

George Washington Carver said, “Education is the key to unlock a golden door of freedom.” And I don’t necessarily disagree. I can still see the value in working with great teachers, getting feedback, introducing yourself to new ideas and aesthetics, and pushing yourself as an artist. But given the power dynamics and barriers still inherent in education and training, I don’t think it’s fair to lock people out and tell them their creativity and perspectives aren’t legitimate if they can’t access these things.

So yes – because I have put in the work to study my own body and explore various styles of dance, and because I am challenging notions of what physical beauty and expressive movement can be – I am a dancer.

From nothing

Cydney Marie Leave a comment

Joy is, in itself, a worthy cause

But even it needs to be created

We are told that our feelings are somehow superfluous

Not real

Yet they can be altered

Changed

By outside forces

You tell me that this strange spirit on the stage isn’t real

Yet I see

The body move, gesture

Breathe

And is something in me not changed in seeing it?

Bodies moving

With each other, and not

Gesture

Breath

Voice

Move into the light

And that’s already a change.

Move downstage

Change

Ensemble in formation

Grasp onto another

Change

Lament

The gaze moves

Change

Meet an audience member’s eyes

And they are changed

A tear

Change

A laugh

A moment to the next

Draw breath

Maybe the soul on the page has never lived

Or maybe they’ve lived and then moved on

But now they breathe again

Exhale

Once I was you

Someday you will be me.

Are you angry yet?

Sad?

Joyful?

Relieved?

Have you yet been changed?

You will be.

Step into the light

Draw breath

Fill the body

Wake up the spirits

Don’t tell me magick isn’t real

This space is charged with light

Buzzing

Every body overfilled with life

And you are a story made flesh

Move, speak your spells right now

There are even witnesses

Invite them in

Mistakes are easily forgiven

Only one thing really matters:

Conjure.

A Crooked, Queer Meditation on The Fool

Cydney Marie Leave a comment

The first tarot deck I ever bought was the Fountain Tarot, and their description of the Fool reads:

“Suspended between spiritual and Earthly existence, the beautiful Fool is the newly born soul embarking on a bright adventure…Though some find his quest absurd, he is not swayed. With an open heart, he is led by the inner voice of his true Self.”

In the major arcana, the Fool comes first in the deck, before many other archetypes such as The Priestess, Magician, Devil, and so on. The Fool has yet to experience either the highs or the lows of their journey and relies on their inner compass to guide them. Because they don’t have much experience to draw from in their journey, they have to become comfortable living in the unknown.

The Muse Tarot, a favorite of mine, includes a poem at the end of every card description, and for the Fool Chris-Anne writes:

Fearlessly jump into

The sea of the cosmos,

The spinning potentials are calling —

maybe a little foolish today

yet better done fool-like

than stalling

Chris-Anne reminds us that sometimes we don’t have the luxury of knowing what’s going to happen or what the right course of action even is, and we still need to act. The show must go on.

One of the greatest steps I took in my artistic journey was embracing the fool. This was both an act of taking the pressure off myself to know everything, and acknowledging the ways in which I’d have to trust myself and my own inner knowing over industry norms that want nothing to do with a Queer, Disabled, Deformed femme actor. The rules as they existed left no space for me.

My own Fool journey was one of coming into deep understanding of the power of transgression. When I was training as a clown, one exercise involved thinking of a common activity, and then coming up with as many ways as possible to screw it up. How many ways can we do the most basic thing wrong? And where is the joy in doing so?

The Fool often doesn’t know how to do things “right” and may not even have any concept of the socially sanctioned ideas of right or wrong, good and bad, acceptable or not even are.

I think back to my childhood self. I was viewed as “crazy” for laughing too loud and too much, or just making weird noises in general, particularly when I wasn’t supposed to. Simultaneously, I was viewed as “angry” because I just couldn’t accept things that I knew deeply to be wrong. Whether it was through laughter or soapboxes, I was calling out absurdity.

Britannica describes the Fool as “a comic entertainer whose madness or imbecility, real or pretended, made him a source of amusement and gave him license to abuse and poke fun at even the most exalted of his patrons.”

The entry goes on to say that the Fool is “often deformed, dwarfed, or crippled…”

You’re telling me…

I spent the first decade of my time in theatre with a 90-degree curve in my spine. This was never meant to be a statement on anything; we perform with our bodies, and this was the body I had.

This Fool asks: Who determines beauty, and why can’t it include me?

Judith Butler said, “Gender is a performance that is repeated and becomes constructed through time.”

In this quote, Judith Butler is addressing the concept of performativity, which they discuss often in their writing on gender. Though it may be tempting to think of performance as something imaginary and fundamentally unreal, Butler argues (as paraphrased by me, a Fool) that performance affects very real change. To perform is to change something. Performing gender makes it real. By taking actions associated with and attempting to look like a given gender, human beings create gender. And it can be recreated anew, and it can look different than before. (It’s worth noting here that the Fool archetype has a long history of breaking down gender norms; my own clown, Pookie Ra Ra, is meant to be a teenage boy, but has noticeable breasts because I don’t like binding).

The Fool asks: What else can be performed differently? How can we change the show? What can we make and remake?

The Fool doesn’t necessarily have the answers. But they are not held back by what is. They remind us that where we lack answers, we can create them.

The Fool reminds us to embrace the unknown.

What the Fool offers us is hope.

“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.” – Rebecca Solnit

Wolverine Stew: To The Keene

clydemg 2 Comments

Tropical shirts and impromptu strings

And a dragon to watch over it all

Plastic ivy wrapped round found/fashioned staves

Tipped with hot-glue pinecones

Dancing screams filling the aisles

Green stars shooting into my eyes

Onto the curtains behind

A place where a rubber chicken

Is a great and terrible power

Paper carefully planted in plots

And watercolor paints

As a library is carried to the seats

And very soon that paper will bloom from

Blank black floors of the stage

That rise to fill the space

When the lights go out

And when they return

The dust rises in a dozen beams

And the show begins