Eliot, Woolf, Plath, Mitchell...

I live and exist through art.

The older I get, and the further I get from my rebellious pre-teen years, the more it seems like my identity and existence are defined through my interactions with others. To be a thing, I must communicate, and no meaningful self can be communicated without artistry.

Further complications arise both from my liberal upbringing and from the near-proverbial "changing times" in which we live. In a conservative society, the basics of identity come from ideas which are well-known to all and easy to communicate: gender, religion, social class, familial relationships. By contrast, in a more liberal society, such things must always be in a state of flux.

Personally, I find that it's the changing status of women that affects me most. Partly this is due to being a woman in a male-dominated field, but mostly I would like to cantankerously blame it on the fact that nearly every notion of feminine sexuality out there either stinks or doesn't suit me. Creativity is clearly called for.

I look back gratefully to the strident feminists who fought for space, who took principled stands and rejected all that came before. Yet I must also bow before the artists who filled that space, borrowing from the culture that feminists repudiated even as they showed how it was flawed or how it might be changed. I'm thinking of George Eliot, whose women accepted the social order and yet you could always see how it was wrong for them. I'm thinking of Virginia Woolf, who could sneak female sexual desire in behind literary curtains. Sylvia Plath, whose self-absorption preserved a somewhat unconventional femininity that others might borrow from if they wished. All three of them had skills that took them far beyond the subject of femininity, yet all three of them could fold in their womanhood as they understood it. For all three of them, that womanhood was cutting edge.

In the past five decades, novelists and singer-songwriters have pasted cutting-edge pictures of womanhood all over the map. I admire Joni Mitchell, who has an unquestioned strength behind her self-questioning. Then there's k. d. lang, who was, I think, my first introduction to the way the queer movement completely redefined sex. The women in many of Anne McCaffrey's novels seem to be inhabiting a different universe (funnily enough...). Sometimes I wish I lived there.

None of what has gone before me is enough. I have a task to do; I believe that every woman does. Perhaps every man does, too. But I look on in awe at the creativity and courage of men and women, past and present. They are my inspiration and my light.

The Sloppy Art of Improv

I haven't been posting much recently. This is because I volunteered to take part in an improvised comedy show at the local university, and the performances have been taking up most of my evenings. It's good fun. The last time I did improv was years ago. I'd had a crazy crush on this guy, in part because he was brilliant at improvisation, which was something I'd always wished I could do myself but never felt up to. So after he dumped me I decided that the sensible thing to do would be to take the plunge and learn how to do it myself rather than trying to obtain it vicariously.

It was one of the best decisions I've ever made. It's not just that I removed one of my reasons for being so crazily in love with a guy who didn't love me back. Learning to do something I hadn't been sure I could do was also a brilliant way to salve my wounded self-esteem.

The hardest thing about improv is coming up with stuff. But there are tricks to that. Think of something. Anything. Can you? Suppose you're playing the classic improv warm-up game "What are you doing?"

B (to A): "What are you doing?"
A: "Climbing a tree."
(B mimes climbing a tree.)
C (to B): "What are you doing?"
B: "Brushing my teeth"
(C mimes brushing her teeth.)
D (to C): "What are you doing?"
...

When it comes to your turn, all the stuff that's based on the objects in the room, the things you were talking about in the prior conversation, the picture on A's T-shirt and so on have already been said. You're not allowed to repeat things. What do you say you are doing?

Think of something!

Okay, try this. Think of a letter. Now think of something that begins with that letter.

Easier, isn't it? Improvisation is always easier when you have something to work with. You can work with a random letter that you've picked yourself. You can work with the rules of a theatre sports game. But the main thing you should be working with is the things the other people on the stage are putting into the scene. If two characters are talking about the weather and they say it's raining, find a way to make the rain part of the story. If somebody mimes handing you something, name it based on how big or heavy it seems to be. If someone accidentally trips over while walking into the scene, there had better be a reason why they tripped, and someone had better supply it. "Sorry about that -- forgot to warn you about the electrical wires," you say, or "Oh, that's my mouse! I've been looking for him for ages!" or "Yes, watch out for the elaborate contraption, won't you?" That last one will require you or someone else to then elucidate exactly what the "elaborate contraption" was supposed to do, and what the potential effects of somebody tripping over it are. If you don't already have a story-line in place, the elaborate contraption will probably take over the whole scene. Possibly it was designed by an evil genius. Possibly it was designed by a bored kid to do his homework for him. Either way, the fact that this new character has tripped over it may well have created the central problem that needs to be solved.

So, yes, that's what I've been doing for the past four nights, and that's what I'll be doing for four nights of next week. It's odd, how right it feels. When I first started to get the hang of improv, I remarked to a friend that it was strange, because I'm not normally the sort of person who likes to come up with strange, random stuff to do out of thin air.

She just looked at me with a slight smile, and said "Yes, you are."

Confession

Yesterday both my flatmates were away and I knew I was safely alone in the house for the night, and somehow as I was mucking around on the internet I realised there were lots of clips from Wicked on youtube. I saw said musical at the West End while I was in the UK last year, and while the story flags a bit in the second half, it's got an utterly superb central character -- gutsy and admirable, and requiring a powerful voice. It's brilliant, the way you end up totally gunning for her even as you can see her scary wicked witch image growing before your eyes (There's also an interesting commentary inherent in the storyline about the differing roles of activists and politicians in creating political change). So anyway, seeing as there was nobody else to mind the noise or think me silly, I sang along at full belt (with the proper technique to try to safeguard my throat, naturally) with a whole lot of videos like this one:



Damn, it was fun.

The Proscenium Arch

I had a sweet singing voice as a kid -- the sort of accurate tunefulness that you don't necessarily expect to hear from a child, and a cute, wistful sense of feeling, you know the type. Oh, my pleased, proud parents! When Mum was a kid, she always wished she could sing. Her father (not a particularly nice man) told her not to be stupid, she couldn't possibly be any good at anything like that. As for my father, he loves to sing. Unfortunately he can't sing for too long without his voice getting hoarse, because he damaged his throat when I was still a baby with a few too many late nights of singing at his regular restaurant slot.

My father in particular was always very keen for me to sing with him. If he couldn't sing as much as he'd like, at least he could play the guitar for me. And thus it was that I ended up singing for grandmothers, aunts, uncles, godparents, family friends, the occasional work colleague or graduate student of my father's, and, really, all and sundry who passed through our house.

The first time my father suggested I sing for some family members, I balked. Squirming, I got up and tried to sing, only to duck away shyly. I didn't dare thus set myself up as worth listening to, and leave myself exposed to evaluation of the implicit claim. I didn't want to have to watch their real-time reaction, right there in front of me. I just ... didn't want to sing.

But I am not, and have never been, a shrinking violet. I hate that girly shyness modesty stuff. So the second time, I steeled myself, and sang. The response was positive, naturally. I do not think I really expected anything else. Responding without seeming proud was definitely one of the more uncomfortable parts of the stomach-churning experience. But it didn't put me off. Most of the time, when my father suggested I sing, I sang.

When it came to solos with the school choir, I quickly became blasé. But with small audiences, in the living room, there's always that core of fear in your gut. You can learn to set it aside to let the song through, but it never really leaves you. It was always there, from the sweet little performances as an eight year old until the day when I was sixteen and finally made enough of a fuss that my father had to stop telling me to "oh, come on, they're expecting it". On stage, it's different. On stage, you have the proscenium arch. It separates you and the audience. It frames what you are doing. It says "this isn't real", and under that cover you can be as real as you like.

Poetry is a proscenium arch. If it's a poem, you're allowed to speak floridly. If you want to exaggerate, it's merely hyperbole. If you want to spill your guts, well, nobody really has to respond to it as anything but a poem, do they? Verse is a particularly good proscenium arch: pay your dues to the gods of rhyme and metre, and you are officially excused the accusation of complete talentlessness and lack of effort.

The separation provided by my pseudonym 'Lynet' can act like a proscenium arch, too.

Nearly all forms of art have a proscenium arch of sorts. The effort to transcend that separation can sometimes mark a piece of art as particularly good, but at other times it's the cover provided by the form that allows the brilliance of honest expression. "I give to you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion," says Tennessee Williams. Well, that's what the proscenium arch is for.

Manet's Olympia

It's interesting that Manet's Olympia is simultaneously an example of 'realist' painting and also a work that sparked incredible controversy not least because of the lack of submissiveness or shyness from the nude portrayed.

I think, or at least hope, that this goes some way to showing that real women are strong and sexual at the same time.