Flowing leaves
For the past few days, I have been listening to the music of Cesaria Evora during my half-hour commute. She is a 60-something singer from the Cape Verde Islands. All the lyrics are in Portuguese, and the melodies are hypnotic, exotic, sad, tribal, exhuberant, memorable. I have listened to one particular cut over and over and each time I listen, I try to focus on a different instrument, and how it contributes to and completes the many-layered piece.
Years ago I taught myself how to draw a complicated diagram of a leaf in preparation for a botany exam. I did this by drawing the leaf over and over…hundreds of times…so that when I sat down to draw it during the exam it flowed from my pencil with no effort.
Before I came to Long Wharf Theatre, I spent most of my working life in newspapers, where you are rarely given the luxury of working on something over and over until you feel it is ready. The theatre process is completely different. The audience sees the culmination of hundreds of hours of the refining of everything connected with the production. And still there is the desire to pick it apart for further revisions. Perhaps the nature of art is that it is in constant process. As a graphic designer responsible for translating the spirit of every play into print, each day I am challenged to refine my vision and process. Some days the creation flows with no effort. And yet it is never really finished.
Another great thing about theater is finding like-minded people.
I had the exact same experience with diagram-drawing, only in my cell biology classes (I was a pre-med). I discovered that I retained information much better visually and actively than aurally and passively. (Lectures kill me; note-taking pulls me through). There’s so much to memorize in cell bio and anatomy and physiology that I began copying the diagrams from my books in order to get the information into my eyes and into my hands; then I’d re-generate the diagrams on the backs of my exams. Once it backfired because the professor thought I was using the diagram to cheat. But otherwise it worked pretty well! Now, I apply the process to script-reading (which I do a lot of, as the literary resident). I keep a sketch-pad next to the script, and do a little story-board as I read.
This is now way off-topic from Barbara’s post. But the leaf-drawing story prompted my memory!
Comment by katie — 28 September 2007 @ 4:39 pm