The Graduate
In the Fall of 1977 I was considering my options after graduation. Having been gone the previous spring to London, I fell into senior year with the excitement of renewing acquaintances (and a fantastic corner dormsuite), but less lead-time to the end of College days than others. Suddenly everyone around me seemed to be talking a bewildering alphabet soup of tests: MBA, GRE, MCAT, etc… or interviewing at grown-up companies like Hewlett-Packard. Doing good in the world? Sure, but we want to get paid for it, seemed to be the general drift. I felt like the game I had been playing seriously for the last three years turned out to only a training camp for the Future, whereas I thought it was the aim itself.
Then I became aware of a program that appealed to my instincts to wander the world, see lots of art and music and theatre, and hone my craft as theatre critic and director. The Watson Fellowship allows undergraduates at select colleges to wander the world with a blank check, investigating some obscure passion. I had known Skip, who had gone to Africa, Ron, who studied clowning in Bali and Paris, Linda, who’d studied mime in Paris and Japan, and later Troy, guitars in Spain and Japan. I figured that researching theatre and dance performances outside the Western sources might lead to clues about presence, form, dramaturgy, and ritual (this was I knew anything about Grotowski, Barba, Brook, and Mnouchkine).
My two choices were Japan and Africa: far enough from Western influence to be almost laboratory isolates, yet with a sufficient profusion of dance, theatre, and musical forms to deserve intensive study. Yet Skip turned me off Africa: hard to find out information about the disparate dance forms, far distanced from each other, speaking different languages. Japan: an island, homogeneous, with ready commercially produced genres seemed a better choice.
In November I made a monthly train trip to NYC to see some theatre. Happening upon Grand Kabuki by Ennosuke Ichikawa at the Beacon Theatre, I bought the program and of earphone guides and headed to the back of the balcony. The mellifluous expert voice of Faubion Bowers guided us through the intricate techniques and story. But I recall half-way through putting them down, realizing that I could understand the story from the printed summary, and could appreciate the spectacle and grain of the voice directly. Here was powerful, acting/dance/musical spectacle that could transcend boundaries of nation and culture. If I could harness just some of these techniques—the hanamichi runway, the kata-fication of gesture, the stylistic code-switching within scenes—I could create a powerful Western form hearkening back to the poetic dance-theatre of the Greeks or Shakespeare. I was hooked.
I went to Boston to meet Peter Arnott, who also introduced ? a critic for Boston after dark, and read a few books by Bowers, Waley, etc… Arnott’s in particular impressed me: he had visited Bryn Mawr with a portable Greek theatre that he wore around his neck. Performing the voices of Medea and chorus and Creon by himself, he insisted that seeing the puppets in the 400 seat ampitheatre hall was close to witnessing the original at the Teahtre of Dionysus from the back rows. The separation of doll and voice was quite moving, his British inflections distancing the story from melodrama. And I thought: I can do that, too.
Unfortunately my application never got out the door. Of the dozen or so applicants from within Haveord, mine wasn’t chosen. Bereft I inquired the reason: “it seemed like you knew the answers to the questions you were raising already,” they replied. Alas, I would have to figure out some other way to get to Japan.
Meanwhile, life moved on: cohorts secured bank and computing and Peace corps positions, graduate school in English, law, medicine. And me: some vague plan to get to Japan, then China, Indonesia, and the mother of all performance India, in the year span I had given myself to “find myself.” But first, to raise some money.
My friend Bill Parsons was a farm-boy from Illinois. He recommended the lima bean harvests, and four of us went out by train. Kim, the brothers ?, and Bill. It was early September, we ahd nothing lined up, and wee excited by the prospects of earning a great deal and not spending some. Indeed, bunked with Mexican workers we worked seven days a week, sunup to sunset, them on the tractors, me in the sifting shed (allergies). I would clean and place large grates above the sluicing waters. When the beans came in from the fields, we would dump them down the plates, and they would separate into large and small, or unuseable. It was easy work, busy in spurts, I was using my body, and enjoyed the jokey collegiality of farmhands. We ate at a local home-cooking restaurant, quite tasty if meager offerings, and spent very, very little of our 3000$. I had made my nest-egg for the beginning of my travels, so returned a slow and ambling journey through the SW to Buffalo in October 1978.
Buffalo is a long way from Japan. A Haverford alum ran Princeton in Asia, introducing recent graduates to a six-week residency Esl program in Shizuoka Prefecture. I interviewed and was offered a job, deferred for a year (February 1980), and first returned to London to continue my theatrical education.
In the Fall of 1977 I was considering my options after graduation. Having been gone the previous spring to London, I fell into senior year with the excitement of renewing acquaintances (and a fantastic corner dormsuite), but less lead-time to the end of College days than others. Suddenly everyone around me seemed to be talking a bewildering alphabet soup of tests: MBA, GRE, MCAT, etc… or interviewing at grown-up companies like Hewlett-Packard. Doing good in the world? Sure, but we want to get paid for it, seemed to be the general drift. I felt like the game I had been playing seriously for the last three years turned out to only a training camp for the Future, whereas I thought it was the aim itself.
Then I became aware of a program that appealed to my instincts to wander the world, see lots of art and music and theatre, and hone my craft as theatre critic and director. The Watson Fellowship allows undergraduates at select colleges to wander the world with a blank check, investigating some obscure passion. I had known Skip, who had gone to Africa, Ron, who studied clowning in Bali and Paris, Linda, who’d studied mime in Paris and Japan, and later Troy, guitars in Spain and Japan. I figured that researching theatre and dance performances outside the Western sources might lead to clues about presence, form, dramaturgy, and ritual (this was I knew anything about Grotowski, Barba, Brook, and Mnouchkine).
My two choices were Japan and Africa: far enough from Western influence to be almost laboratory isolates, yet with a sufficient profusion of dance, theatre, and musical forms to deserve intensive study. Yet Skip turned me off Africa: hard to find out information about the disparate dance forms, far distanced from each other, speaking different languages. Japan: an island, homogeneous, with ready commercially produced genres seemed a better choice.
In November I made a monthly train trip to NYC to see some theatre. Happening upon Grand Kabuki by Ennosuke Ichikawa at the Beacon Theatre, I bought the program and of earphone guides and headed to the back of the balcony. The mellifluous expert voice of Faubion Bowers guided us through the intricate techniques and story. But I recall half-way through putting them down, realizing that I could understand the story from the printed summary, and could appreciate the spectacle and grain of the voice directly. Here was powerful, acting/dance/musical spectacle that could transcend boundaries of nation and culture. If I could harness just some of these techniques—the hanamichi runway, the kata-fication of gesture, the stylistic code-switching within scenes—I could create a powerful Western form hearkening back to the poetic dance-theatre of the Greeks or Shakespeare. I was hooked.
I went to Boston to meet Peter Arnott, who also introduced ? a critic for Boston after dark, and read a few books by Bowers, Waley, etc… Arnott’s in particular impressed me: he had visited Bryn Mawr with a portable Greek theatre that he wore around his neck. Performing the voices of Medea and chorus and Creon by himself, he insisted that seeing the puppets in the 400 seat ampitheatre hall was close to witnessing the original at the Teahtre of Dionysus from the back rows. The separation of doll and voice was quite moving, his British inflections distancing the story from melodrama. And I thought: I can do that, too.
Unfortunately my application never got out the door. Of the dozen or so applicants from within Haveord, mine wasn’t chosen. Bereft I inquired the reason: “it seemed like you knew the answers to the questions you were raising already,” they replied. Alas, I would have to figure out some other way to get to Japan.
Meanwhile, life moved on: cohorts secured bank and computing and Peace corps positions, graduate school in English, law, medicine. And me: some vague plan to get to Japan, then China, Indonesia, and the mother of all performance India, in the year span I had given myself to “find myself.” But first, to raise some money.
My friend Bill Parsons was a farm-boy from Illinois. He recommended the lima bean harvests, and four of us went out by train. Kim, the brothers ?, and Bill. It was early September, we ahd nothing lined up, and wee excited by the prospects of earning a great deal and not spending some. Indeed, bunked with Mexican workers we worked seven days a week, sunup to sunset, them on the tractors, me in the sifting shed (allergies). I would clean and place large grates above the sluicing waters. When the beans came in from the fields, we would dump them down the plates, and they would separate into large and small, or unuseable. It was easy work, busy in spurts, I was using my body, and enjoyed the jokey collegiality of farmhands. We ate at a local home-cooking restaurant, quite tasty if meager offerings, and spent very, very little of our 3000$. I had made my nest-egg for the beginning of my travels, so returned a slow and ambling journey through the SW to Buffalo in October 1978.
Buffalo is a long way from Japan. A Haverford alum ran Princeton in Asia, introducing recent graduates to a six-week residency Esl program in Shizuoka Prefecture. I interviewed and was offered a job, deferred for a year (February 1980), and first returned to London to continue my theatrical education.
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