Been busy as a beaver lately, as they say. I don’t know who says that, but I’m sure somebody does… Let’s see… I have been in training to become a chess coach as a part time job. I’ve started to gain experience with lights and electrics at my theatre. We’re hanging lights (attached to a grid made of metal pipes) for the next show. Electrical work - in general - tends to earn you a higher hourly rate than carpentry work. This applies to both residential and other types of construction, I’m told, as well as theatrical labor situations. Not going to become a millionaire from it or anything, but it’s all about learning new skills and backing them up with practical experience. In fact, I’ve had more hours at my theatre lately than ever before - which has been awesome. I’ve also been doing some light work volunteering at another theatre further downtown which is less than half the size, but twice the age. What I’ve been realizing with things like this: if there’s something you want, especially in a job-type situation, you just have to do it regardless of whether or not you’re getting paid (at least to begin with) and the work will come to you. What I mean is, I’ve been donating my time at one place and getting rewarded with extra hours and new learning opportunities at another place. I don’t know if we need to resort to calling it some kind of karmic thing, so much as that when you know what you want to do, and you develop habits which support that, you set in motion inexorable cause-effect forces, a kind of momentum that eventually carries you the rest of the way toward your goal. What’s that Sufi saying? Something about taking one step towards God and God takes ninety-nine steps toward you?
Parallel to the practical stuff, I’ve been - as you may know - engaging in heavy historical, cultural and theoretical research relating to the domain of theatre and folk theatrical traditions in particular. I’ve got a never-ending list of books coming my way from the Enoch Pratt Free Library, which I have been assiduously annotating with stickies, then copying down quotations onto note cards for later use, and photocopying longer passages. Over the course of two months, the direction of my research has begun to make itself plain simply on account of the types of information I have gathered this way. The path reveals itself the farther you walk on it.
This past Monday morning, I went on a free historical tour of Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre down on Eutaw Street, lead by the docent there, an older man full of information who was plainly in love with the Hippodrome and the institution of theatre itself. We even managed to get a couple of ghost stories out of him, which is always fun. Theatres tend to be full of ghosts. The Hippodrome tour fits in as part of the next phase of my Monument City project. In that, a friend and I completely documented the historic monuments and memorials around the city: photos, GPS coordinates, mapped locations, location notes and historical write-ups for each location. We’re planning to do the same thing for all the old theatres from back in the heyday of Baltimore Theatre - which, at this point, I’d probably peg somewhere in the 1880’s to 1920’s or so, kind of at the height of Vaudeville, melodramas and the touring circuit. The Hippodrome, newly restored as of five years ago, is kind of the crown jewel of this collection. It’s too bad that “union rules” forbade us from taking photos inside. (It’s funny to me how unions are invoked with this almost superstitious quality in circumstances like these…)
Meanwhile, I’ve been practicing my back-cross, a juggling move which I’ve been attempting for over a year which I’ve only recently been able to land. In three club juggling (though I guess you can do it with balls), you’re juggling your normal pattern when, suddenly, boom, a hand goes behind your back and you throw a club behind you catching it in your opposite hand without messing up the overall pattern. Devastatingly tricky, but my practice time is beginning to pay off.
In fact, everything I’m doing is starting to pay off, individually, and all the various streams are coming together quite nicely. It’s a peculiar life situation to be in, to be honest. I feel like I’ve spent so much time up till now striving to figure certain things out - which I’m now figuring out - that it becomes time to find a new way to define yourself, the quest, the struggle, the goals. Spent so much time developing my “personal power” or my “inner flame” which is now burning brightly… but what do you do with it? What do you apply it to? And how do you learn what the right application of force is, of pressure? So much craft work is all about developing “the touch.” The skill is in the hands, in using just enough, but not more than enough. Letting the tool do the work, having these things become extensions of not just your body, but of your consciousness, your will. How do you develop that? How do you teach others to develop that? I’ve been reading a book about the journeyman artisans of France, the compagnons, who go on an extended Tour de France - not the bicycle race, but a voyage of discovery and mastery of their chosen skill. One of the emblems which aspirants on this journey will wear is that of the Labyrinth. It symbolizes both the difficulty of the journey inward to find the treasure hidden at the center of the maze, but also the journey one must take back outward from the center in which one becomes able to transmit that wisdom and experience to others who are just taking up the journey afresh.
