how I experience things

I came to the realization a few years ago that every song I held dear to my heart, all the music I have ever loved, I had no idea what the lyrics to the songs were. Well, I knew the words, I knew them by heart, and could sing along with ease and passion, but I had no idea what those collection of words meant in the context of any kind of storytelling.

If I tried, if I looked, I obviously could decipher it. It wasn't an inability to understand, but what I came to realize is that when I experienced a piece of music, I experienced it on an incredibly visceral and emotional level. A couple of years ago I was thinking about some of the songs I knew by heart from my high school years and decided to pay attention to the words I was singing to myself. And it was an amazing revelation. I couldn't believe that there was this whole other layer there.

Writing this I feel slightly embarrassed. People always used to talk about Bob Dylan (before my time) and how great his lyrics and poetry were, for example. I would nod, taking their word for it that his lyrics were, in fact great. I hear the same thing every now and then about contemporary song writers. And undoubtedly, some of the great bands I hold dear to my heart must also have put equally as much thought into the stories their songs were telling. Was I that much different from everybody else?

Then I realized that this... way of experiencing things..... was not confined to just music. It was confined to almost all art. And very much so to theatre, which terrified me.

But how did it apply to the theatre? This was scary. I probably began to realize it way back when I wrote my post entitled Form, Content, and My Attention Span. I came to the insane realization that my love of the theatre is in making it. I like the epistemology, I love the implications, I adore the medium. But. I do not generally enjoy watching theatre.

I go. Because I do sometimes really enjoy it, and when the show is really good it is usually a wonderful experience. But what is good for me in watching a show and what is good for me in making a show are two very very different things. I would much rather be in a rehearsal room than in a chair in an audience watching a play. I realized that I really found most theatre to be a usually boring intellectual enterprise which usually failed to connect with me on any visceral level, and therefore could never penetrate my psyche.

So whether I was listening to music, or at a play, or at a concert, I connect with the experience in this very "surface" way. I love going to big rock/punk/ska/other concerts and just completely engaging with the rest of the audience and the music, hollowed out of any intellectual substance other than the rhythm and ecstasy of that moment. It's Dionysian and possessive and strange and wonderful. I have tons of "guilty pleasures" in music (see Kelly Clarkson, my new biggest crush) because of beautiful singing voices, pulsating rhythms, or incredibly dramatic progressions and song structures; personalities. I generally could care less if they are singing about their dog that died or their brother that died or singing some advocacy song about global warming. I don't experience music in that way at all.

In theatre, I have an incredibly short attention span. I need to constantly be tugged on and engaged with much more so than in film or television. It's not so much that I am not trying to understand the stuff of the play, or the literary/philosophical ramifications of what i am seeing. I've trained so much in that that it has become unavoidable. But my first line of defense in the theatre is something that fourth walls, proscenium arches, and banal technique cannot satisfy.

As a director, this has a huge affect on my work. The kind of theatre I want to be involved with is an experience. It grabs you, it excites you, and it viscerally effects you. That being said, I really am simply in love with the process of making theatre, the craft of acting, of bringing a play/performance to life. It is quite possible that some of what I create, I might not completely like myself, but of course, I don't like going to the theatre that much.

The way I experience things has a direct effect on the very minutia of the detail that permeate my work from moment to moment. I work very small, and very carefully. If I'm bored or if something's not working, I know it, because that's the first line of defense for my gaze. None of this is meant to mean that I am not interested in text or substance. I am deeply concerned with it, primarily concerned with it. But in making theatre, structures breed structures breed structures. We concern ourselves with content and we end up also working on form and the structure takes shape and we work on moments and we loop back to focusing on content, etc. The important thing to note is how the motor works that drives the process forward. It works different for everyone.

I think everybody has a different way of experiencing things. This is just my most recent personal revelation. I know there are a lot of people out there who only listen to music because of the stories the lyrics tell. Or there are those who love music that fights a common structure, or is an offbeat refutation of popular forms. That's great, I think there's room in this world for all of these ways of experiencing music, as well as theatre.

There is a place for spectacle and there is a place for minimalism and there is a place for language and a place for storytelling. I don't think that artists have a responsibility to conform to one way of creating based on one way that an audience might experience something. The most successful works of art I have ever seen in all realms (visual, literary, dramatic, musical, etc.) have been, first and foremost, personal. Whether Tennessee Williams writes autobiographically, or Kurt Cobain writes a song about wanting to commit suicide, or simply an artist making the work they make based on the way they experience life and art. That's all you can really ask. Since these works of art don't just happen in artist's homes in private, but instead are made public, the feedback loop begins, but the notion of responsibility actually, to me, becomes much more fluid.

What I have told you is the way that I, Matt, tend to experience art. And instead of being hard on myself, insisting that that's not good enough. I have come to accept it and try to come to terms with how I can harness it for myself personally.