little helena’s big adventure…

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so this past sunday I went to go see Ira Glass in DC.  I love him even more now.  He was so captivating and extremely funny.  what I love the most about him was that he was a regular guy.

the evening started out in the dark….

the show began with the lights going out and Ira just began talking… just like he usually does.  the way he likes to- where no one can see him… but only hear him.  he said he would have loved to have done the whole show in the dark… but that there would be too many complaints.  but then the lights finally came up, and he said “yes, this is what i look like…”

he had so many great stories- i feel like thats what hes all about…stories.  life just consists of one story after the other.  he talked a lot about his process about telling a story.  that there is an action, then another action…an action…an action… then reflection.  he kept reiterating that.  he is so invested in his work.  its great to see someone who loves their work so much.  you can just hear it in his voice ;)  he creates so many great connections with the people he interviews, and his listeners.

the other thing that struck me was how genuinely funny he was.  he was almost like a stand up comic.  I was laughing the whole time.  i was really happy to have my mom come and enjoy the show as well. to be honest, when i told my mom about Ira Glass she had never really heard of him, but now she loves him.

i really wish i had taken notes, and written down everything he said.  i wish i could be like him…have job that i love doing and create great inventive work that truly touches and educates people.

on the drive back jon, donna and i listened to one of his pieces- “fiasco” and it was a great way to end a fantastic evening.

ok well over the weekend i went home and had some time to relax. on saturday morning i woke up to my mom waking me up and saying “you should wake and come and watch this documentary on the tv” i grumbled…but then i got up. it was a documentary about The Gates, an art installation that was put up in central park in 2005. i vaguely remember hearing something about it in the news awhile ago…but i dont in New York at the time- so i guess i didn’t pay too much attention to it. but it was so interesting…

The Gates were designed by Christo and Jeanne Claude. The Gates were displayed for 2 weeks all around central park. and by all around… i mean all around. From an ariel view they looked like dominoes. They are saffron-colored fabric panels that lined 23 miles of pedestrian paths. The artists said they have been working on the project for over 20 years. Christo thought of the idea in 1979 and has been working on it since. The Gates was financed entirely by the Christos, with not a penny of grants, city money, or donations- is budgeted at $20 million: 7,500 gates that will frame the pathways of Central Park.

(the quoted information following came from a New York Magazine article in 2005 by Adam Sterngergh)

Each of the gates were “sixteen feet high, secured to a heavy metal base and trailing a swath of bright saffron-colored fabric, all of which, together in the wind, will create a shimmering river of color. The official title of the work is The Gates: Central Park, New York, 1979–2005, and that 26-year span in the date is no typo.”

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About Christo and Jeanne-Claude: “Their sense of themselves as collaborators, though, is something closer to symbiosis. They were both born on June 13, 1935, he in Bulgaria, she in Casablanca, to a French military family. Jeanne-Claude is fond of combining their ages; she once told a reporter they’d just turned 120. They travel everywhere together, except on planes—they want to ensure, in the event of a crash, that the other one remains to finish any ongoing work.”

“To the public, the Christos are popularly known, much to their frustration, as ‘the wrapping artists’ or, even more colloquially, as ‘the guy who wraps things.’ This is mostly a result of their most widely publicized work to date, Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin, 1971–1995, an installation that involved wrapping the entire German Parliament building in silvery fabric, so that it looked like an enormous wedding cake.But many of their other works, they point out, have nothing to do with wrapping. The Umbrellas, for instance, consisted of 3,100 umbrellas, planted across 30 miles of countryside in California and Japan. Or Running Fence, a 1976 work for which they erected a 241⁄2-mile, eighteen-foot-high fence of rippling white fabric that snaked across Sonoma and Marin counties in California, then disappeared into the ocean.”

“Jeanne-Claude seems to relish her reputation as an art-world Yoko Ono. ‘This is my best quality,’ she told Burt Chernow, their biographer. ‘It has protected Christo all these years. I think every artist needs a monster.’ Later, I asked her to elaborate on the sentiment. She laughed. ‘In the art world, they like to say, ‘Christo is so nice and gentle, and he always says yes to everybody.’ Then he sends me to say no.”

Many people tried to sway the artists opinions on such a big and expensive project. Many just didn’t like the location. Others “tried to sway the Christos toward less delicate locations: the Coney Island boardwalk or the Park Avenue mall. At a lecture at the Pratt Institute, a city official asked the artists why they wouldn’t consider Prospect Park as an alternative. Jeanne-Claude stood up brusquely from her chair. ‘I want to ask the gentleman a silly question,’ she said. ‘Did you marry the lady you wanted or did you marry an alternative woman?”

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After years of fighting and different grant proposals, the project finally went underway. The result was spectacular. I love that these two people are“performing the role of modern artists for people who don’t like modern art.” They were putting their artwork out there for each and every person to see. It wasn’t trapped inside a gallery- it available to the public. I love these people. They are such characters- and i love them even more for it. They are the epitome of thinking outside the box.

What i really loved about the documentary and the whole story, was everyones different response to the project. Some loved it and some hated it. People said comments relating to the fact that they were making central park ugly, and that the park itself is already a piece of art work….”would you paint something else over The Last Supper.” Others thought the project was beautiful and so important, and brought something new and fresh to the park, the city, and the art world.

projects like this really makes me love art…and people. art isn’t just about producing something, its about producing something to have an effect on people (whether they like it or not)

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Painting by Marcel Duchamp

Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,
A gold of lemon, root and rind,
She sifts in sunlight down the stairs
With nothing on. Nor on her mind.

We spy beneath the banister
A constant thresh of thigh on thigh–
Her lips imprint the swinging air
That parts to let her parts go by.

One-woman waterall, she wears
Her slow descent like a long cape
And pausing, on the final stair
Collects her motions into shape.

X. J. Kennedy

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we talked about this painting this morning during my principles of design class.  I had never heard of the painting or really the artist- Marcel Duchamp.  His “work and ideas had considerable influence on the development of post- World War II Western art, and whose advice to modern art collectors helped shape the tastes of the Western art world.”  I was lucky enough to have my computer in class, so I could look up the picture.  I love how broken down the piece is.  Even with the broken aspect of it there is great cohesiveness and unity.  There is such elegant movement.

later today, i checked out the book “The Theatre Posters of James McMullan” from Gregg’s library.  I started looking through it and found a quote from Jim McMullan that really connected with me and what I felt in response to the painting “Nude Descending a Staircase.”

Jim McMullan: “I don’t invent from thin air, but from my response to real physical information…The vitality of the human body, closely observed in its idiosyncrasies, is what has always fascinated me about the posters of Toulouse-Lautrec…the body itself became a quickly understood gesture like the movement of a mime or a dancer.”

I can see what he is talking about,and I can see it Duchamp’s work as well.  The human form has obviously been a subject for design and art since there was art; and it will continue to be.  Personally, i’ve always been daunted by the human form.  I’ve taken classes and workshops and had live models… there is so much to take into consideration when drawing each line.  If it is off by just a centimeter the whole shape is off.  I love the words McMullan uses: vitality, idiosyncrasies…etc.  I also greatly admire Toulouse-Lautrec.  I can see admiration for Laurtrec in McMullan’s work.  There is such focus and attention payed to the emotion behind the body position and facial expressions.  So much is said with so little.

I was lucky enough to be able to talk to Jim McMullan for about 20 minutes this past Friday.  The converstaion started off slowly and kinda generically.  I could tell he had answered these types of questions many times before; and he was hoping for more intriguing and personal questions.  I reasured to him that I didn’t want to sound like a broken record and what I really wanted to hear was his story, not just a formula as how to make it as an artist.  Be bluntly told me…”You just have to be talented.”

This made me question though… what exaclty is talent?  Some people are so talented, but are never really “discovered.” I thinks a combination of being talented, of course; but also being in the right place at the right time.  Jim McMullan told me that he was working at drawing book covers, and doing theatre posters just came about because a friend (another artist who designed theatre posters) passed along his name to the Lincoln Center Theatre.

My conversation with Jim McMullan puts things into a more “blunt” perspective.  Jim was very to the point.  He said he’s always been a devoted reader, and is focused on the “density of writing” and interested in “serious dense subject matter.”

He’s very grateful that he’s had the opportunity to do what he does.  He describes designing the theatre posters as a way to reach the audience and pull them in. Each poster is an identity- an opinion.  He also told me something that I never really thought about before. The posters make the the actors feel good about the production. It’s true- I love seeing the posters…i love seeing them go around campus, and people stopping and looking at them.

I had a really great talk with him, and I’m so grateful.

free time…? what is this? i actually have free time.

(this is a koala napping… i thought it was appropriate…)

well its a lovely Tuesday afternoon, and i just woke from a wonderful nap. I can’t remember the last time i was able to have a nap. Obviously since the show isn’t running this Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday… i actually have some time to get things sorted out in my life haha. Things have been so hectic, its weird to have a time when it’s not now. I dont really know what to do with my self.

I hope this break will just give me the motivation and rest I need to finish the play as strong as I possible can. This past weekend was rough. There were nights when I was really proud, and really did want to perform for the audience…and then some nights were a little less- not that shows were bad, but I just didn’t feel like we were doing it complete justice. i really want to finish the show of with a bang. i want my emotion and strength to be at high point (and not speak too fast, to follow a note hah) I really want to push myself to prove to myself, to gregg, to whole cast and production team that I can be Joan, and give my strongest performance yet…

wish me luck, actually lets hope i break appendages…

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ok so apparently i stumped gregg on what i’m doing for my research topic for ideas. what i want from this trip is essentially to soak in as much as i can. I want to see the city and i want to see the people. the reason why i took this class was to hopefully find out what i want to do vocational in theatre. i feel like there are so many options that i haven’t even fathomed. there are so many ways i think i can be involved in the theatre as work, but still love it as my passion.

if i could find a world that perfectly blended my love for visual art and theatre… i would take it. or at least start learning how to do it now so i will be able to do it in the future.

i’m going to set up a meeting with gregg to hopefully buckle down on something substantial. i trust gregg, and hopefully we can come with some thing to do with my self.

well, when i see images like this it really helps me put things into perspective. we all have our lives… and we all have our hopes and dreams. your own personal life seems like the most important thing… but to someone else, of course, their life is the most important. when i think about the affect i can have on the world i live in, i have to be practical but still hopeful that i can cause change.

this idea is very important in my process to understand joan in Far Away. I have this image of joan being the young activist that thrusts herself into something bigger… thinking that she can stop the war… stop the pain. but it can’t be just one person. she has a naive look on the world, and she hasn’t thought everything through. she is risking her life for something she may not fulling believe in.

i, of couse, want to make my mark… but what will it be? what will i have to sacrifice? what will i have to go through to achieve it?…. only time will tell.

well today has been….well a little ridiculous.  I don’t want to ramble about my day…but maybe i will.  It all started off at 8:15 when i woke up, then a tedious geography lab for 2 hours, then theatre management… never mind i’m even getting bored with this schedule.  But the day was filled completely with endless things to do.  I some how managed to carry on with a smile for the whole day… until the very end of the day.  Rehearsal was going really well, and I felt like progress was definitely being made… but then while backstage I had the worst case of overwhelmed/overheated/dizzy feeling.  I did my best to push through and was sucessful for most of it, but then just needed a break….

thats kinda how im feeling about mostly everything.  I feel like im doing the best i’ve done with time management and working under pressure and stress that i have ever done before.  i know i’m not going to get work done if i’m stressing about getting my  work done. even though i may have a pretty good grasp on my “to do list”…i’m a little lost about where i am.

this digital story about “where i am right now” is incredibly daunting for me right now.  i have a very vague idea of where i am… i’m know i’m here- at Mary Washington as a student… but what am i going to do with that. I’m really hoping that this class will help me figure it out.  thats probably why we are doing this assignment.  we get to see where we think we are… and then at then end of this experience we can actually see who we are.

but where to begin… i’ve had some ideas, of course, and written them down.  but nothing seems to strike me as a way i would like to present where i am right now in my life.  there is so much going on right now… and i’m not sure where its going or where it will end up.

but for right now to get a clearer idea …i think i need to sleep. hopefully tomorrow will be a better day