Tagged — Jamie Lyons
Theater Rehearsal, Dance Rehearsal, Ballet Rehearsal... it is where the bullshit artists get exposed.
I spent years with Mabou Mines Lee Breuer. Years. Touring with him on productions like Gospel at Colonus, watching him rehearse Peter and Wendy, sitting through the rebuilding of Hajj. You want to know what separates professional theater from the pretenders? Lee fucking Breuer in a rehearsal room.
Lee didn't coddle. He didn't "explore." He dug into the back of your brain until he found the thing you're ashamed of, the secret you keep hidden, and he yanked it out and put it center stage. That's the work. And if you can't handle it, get the fuck out.
I watched Ruth Maleczech rehearse Hajj... this epic solo piece Lee wrote for her, all mirrors and video and cutting-edge technology that looked like witchcraft in the '80s. She sat at that vanity table night after night, applying makeup, performing this meditation on identity and self that would make most actors weep. No breaks. No "I'm not feeling it today." Just work. Relentless, disciplined, terrifying work.
Gospel at Colonus... Sophocles reimagined through Pentecostal service, the Blind Boys of Alabama channeling Greek tragedy through gospel. I toured that thing for years. You think Broadway is hard? Try taking a production with a dozen singers, a full choir on the road, city after city, keeping it tight, keeping it honest, keeping it from becoming just another "important" theater piece that means nothing.
Lee Breuer knew. The Blind Boys of Alabama knew. Every person in that company understood that half-assing it wasn't an option. You showed up ready or you got left behind.
Then there's Peter and Wendy, Bunraku puppets, Celtic music, Karen Kandel voicing every single character. You watch Kandel in rehearsal and you understand what "craft" actually means. She's not playing dress-up. She's not "finding her voice." She's working, precise, technical, uncompromising. Lee Breuer demands it. The material demands it. And Kandel delivers because she's a fucking professional.
Compare that to Stanford. Student productions. Kids who've never suffered trying to understand Sophocles. Rich children who think theater is about self-expression, about "finding themselves." Most of them are useless. They stop rehearsal for water breaks. They need to "process their emotions." They want to discuss their fucking motivation instead of just doing the work.
Every once in a while, maybe one in twenty, you get a kid who gets it. Who shows up early, stays late, treats some nobody student production like it's the National Theatre. That kid has the same hunger Lee Breuer's actors have. That's the one worth watching. The rest are just filling space until they graduate and go ruin the world in tech.
I've also been in rooms with Anna Deavere Smith at the Mark Taper Forum, watching her rehearse Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. Smith spent years interviewing people who watched their city burn, then turned herself into a human archive, embodying three dozen voices with surgical precision. That's professional theater. That's someone who knows exactly what she's doing and doesn't waste a single second.
Here's what I learned from Lee Breuer, from Anna Deavere Smith, from watching LINES Ballet dancers repeat the same eight-count for three hours: rehearsal is the only place where the work matters more than the result. Performance is for the audience, their applause, their reviews, their social media posts. Rehearsal is where you actually do the thing. Where you fail. Where you eat shit in front of everyone and then get up and try again because that's the job.
You can fake your way through a performance. Charm, good looks, dumb luck, it'll get you through one show. But rehearsal? Rehearsal exposes you. It shows everyone exactly who you are: someone who does the work or someone who just showed up for their résumé.
I've worked on Mabou Mines productions that won Obies, that changed American theater. And I've worked with Stanford kids stumbling through the same material. The difference isn't talent. It isn't even skill. It's hunger. It's discipline. It's understanding that nobody owes you shit and the only thing that matters is whether you're willing to put in the work.
That's why I love rehearsals. Not the performances. Performances are makeup and lights and applause. Rehearsals are where you see the truth. Where people either show up or they don't.
And most people don't.
rehearsal (n.) late 14c., "restatement, repetition of the words of another," from rehearse + -al, or from Old French rehearsal "a repeating." c. 1300, "to give an account of," from Anglo-French rehearser, Old French rehercier (12c.) "to go over again, repeat," literally "to rake over, turn over" (soil, ground), from re- "again" + hercier "to drag, trail (on the ground), be dragged along the ground; rake, harrow (land); rip, tear, wound; repeat, rehearse;" from herse "a harrow". Meaning "to say over again, repeat what has already been said or written" is from mid-14c. in English. late 14c., "restatement, repetition of the words of another," from rehearse + -al, or from Old French rehearsal "a repeating." Sense of "practice a play, part, etc." is from 1570s. Sense in theater and music, "act of rehearsing," is from 1570s. Pre-wedding rehearsal dinner attested by 1953. We cannot recall our dreams, they cannot come back to us. If a dream comes – but what sort of coming is a dream's? Through what night does it make its way? If it comes to us, it does so only by way of forgetfulness, a forgetfulness which is not only censorship or simply repression. We dream without memory, in such a way that the dream of any particular night is no doubt a fragment of a response to an immemorial dying, barred by desire’s repetitiousness. There is no stop, there is no interval between dreaming and waking. In this sense, it is possible to say: never, dreamer, can you awake (nor, for that matter, are you able to be addressed thus, summoned). The dream is without end, waking is without beginning; neither one nor the other ever reaches itself. Only dialectical language relates them to each other in view of a truth.
Cinematics 2024
Shooting dance rehearsal is like trying to bottle lightning while someone keeps striking the match over and over again. Répétition. The French got it right. Repetition, yes, but also something more… a ritual of refinement, of searching. Watch these LINES dancers move through Alonzo King‘s choreography and you’re watching the same phrase fifty times, but […]
Read
Cinematics / Industries 2019
The deep art… That’s the part that has to be guarded like a miser would his money… Like a dope addict would his dope… Like a lover with their love. Alonzo King What I’ve got here is the real raw nerve ending of creation caught mid spasm: dancers drilling themselves into some kind of […]
ReadCinematics 2018
This city used to be where you could fuck around and find out. Not in some precious way, but in the way that actually meant something, where a choreographer could look at a quartet that’s been demolishing the boundaries of what four strings can do for decades and say, “Yeah, let’s see what happens when […]
Read
Speculation 2018
The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence … The Photograph then becomes a bizarre (i)medium(i), a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so […]
Read
Individualism 2018
You don’t understand what it means to be in that room until you’re in that room. Not watching, that’s what tourists do, what the assholes with the expensive seats do. I mean in it, close enough to see the sweat, the micro-adjustments of his fingers, the way his whole body becomes an argument with silence. […]
Read
Speculation 2017
Philoctetes, that poor bastard marooned on Lemnos with nothing but his festering wound and his famous bow, becomes this perfect metaphor for anyone who’s ever been discarded by the machinery. The Aeschylus fragment’s almost gone, just scraps really, which makes it even more tragic because we’re left rehearsing ghosts under some absurd totem pole like […]
ReadSpeculation 2017
Oedipus and Tiresias (Nathaniel Justiniano and Tonyanna Borkovi) rehearsing for a site specific staged reading of Anthony Burgess’ adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus The King to be performed in the Fort Mason Chapel for the San Francisco International Art Festival and produced by the Museum of Performance and Design Oedipus and Tiresias walk into a Japantown […]
Read
Speculation 2016
Roble Gym Rehearsal, Stanford University with Judy Syrkin-Nikolau The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work. Émile Zola
Read
Speculation 2016
Speculation: Rehearsing Sophocles #116. Fantastic rehearsal/experimentation/playing/imagining with amazing people at sunrise under a full moon… for Sophocles Savage Blasts. Here’s what the photographs don’t tell you: it’s cold as hell out there at the Wave Organ at dawn. The bay doesn’t care about your artistic intentions. The concrete under your feet is unforgiving, and the […]
Read
Speculation 2016
Slacker’s Hill, Marin Headlands: some places just earn their names through the accumulated weight of bodies showing up, doing nothing in particular, letting the view do all the work. But at sunrise, with Muriel Maffre and Ryan Tacata running Euripides fragment #91 (we’re calling it Love is The Fullest Education) on this windswept chunk of rock […]
ReadSpeculation 2015
Speculation: Site Specific Dance Rehearsal as the Chocolate Heads‘ rehearse at McMurty Art Building, Stanford. It’s about trying to frame something. And draw attention to it and say, “Here’s the beauty in this. I’m going to put a frame around it, and I think this is beautiful.” That’s what artists do. It’s really a pointing […]
Read
FalseArt 2015
You walk into rehearsal with this thing in your head: this perfect, shimmering bastard of an idea. And then reality shows up with a tire iron and starts beating the shit out of it. But here’s the thing: that’s not a bug, it’s the whole goddamn point. I’m working with other people, right? Some of […]
Read
Speculation 2014
The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone. Instead of growing more sensible in death, the inhabitants of the cemetery were sillier than they had been in life. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being Truth? About getting to the marrow of what Shakespeare actually meant? Then get your ass out of those antiseptic black box […]
Read
Speculation 2014
We Players Lear Rehearsal at Battery Wallace in the Marin Headlands Doth any here know me? This is not Lear: Doth Lear walk thus? speak thus? Where are his eyes? Either his notion weakens, his discernings Are lethargied–Ha! waking? ’tis not so. Who is it that can tell me who I am? Shakespeare, King Lear, […]
ReadSpeculation 2014
Speculation: We Players Macbeth Rehearsal at Fort Point… MACBETH Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart? Doctor Therein the patient […]
Read
Speculation 2013
Looking at this rehearsal documentation, what strikes me is how Astrid understands that authenticity isn’t some precious thing you excavate from your soul like a goddamn archaeological dig. It’s messier than that. It’s the collision between what you’re trying to say and the violence of actually saying it. Her piece traffics in that space between […]
Read
Speculation 2013
Look, I have nothing against scholars. Hell, I am one, PhD and all, even if that fact makes me want to punch myself in the face sometimes. But there’s a particular kind of fuckery that happens when really smart people theorize about performance in ways that completely erase how it’s actually made. When they’re basically […]
Read
Collusion 2011
Failure… it’s the only fucking meal worth eating when you’re stupid enough to think you can improve Anton Chekhov. My Head is Burning. Christ, of course it is. Your head, their heads, Chekhov’s rotting tubercular head somewhere in a Russian cemetery still burning with the knowledge that a hundred years later, some ambitious assholes with […]
ReadCollusion 2010
Speculation: Friends around a table, wine flowing, talking about impossible things like how the fuck we’re going to mount a puppet show in a living room. This is Niki’s vision we’re serving here. And when I say serving, I mean it in the most primal sense. Everyone at this table, Nat included, is there to […]
Read