IT'S ABOUT TIME

Faced with dilemma of my despair and confusion in the midst of a government imposed lockdown without any referendum of its people, I felt I was powerless to control my destiny. The COV-19 Pandemic establishment, fueled by the pied piper of the CDC, had determined that all I had worked for during my lifetime, and all that I was currently engaged in, was not worthwhile in light of a new virus launched by surprise on an unsuspecting global population.

As I fought through the brain fog of isolation and shutdown, I began to understand that I was allowing myself to be victimized by the circumstances of confinement. I needed to find my way out of this pandemic maze that had totally shredded the mechanisms of routines in my life that had imbued each day with structure and purpose.

Everything seemed to collapse and merge to the problem, (blackhole) of TIME.

Ah, Time...the dilemma of life, of science, of the universe...the focus of Einstein... the relativity of the absolute. Hadn't I always grappled with this... remembering my attraction to and obsession with Martin Heiddeger's BEING AND TIME?
Remembering my romance with phenomenology and ontology, that began when I went to NYU after completing my doctorate at Columbia. That romance began because of an encounter with my colleague in the Art Department, David Ecker, an astonishing phenomenologist who, at first seemed to be talking nonsense, when suddenly heuncovered the landmines of objective reality---and he was opening a new world of wonderment, clear vision and understanding of method. Later, I stumbled across Heidegger's TIME AND BEING, written near the end of his career as an experiment in philosophy and education.

Ecker focused on the process of the phenomenological method, using language as a tool of inquiry to uncover layers of meaning.  While I had read of Heidegger in my philosophy studies, I had not fully understood phenomenological use of language as a tool of inquiry, moving through layers of meaning from phenomenological description to meta-critical observations and conclusions. So as I came across Heidegger's reversal in the twilight of his career: On Time and Being, I was delighted that this was drawn from lectures for a select group of students in which he declares that he has no idea what his lectures will be about, but that they will discover the content of the lectures as it emerges from the class as a platform for inquiry.  I identified with this approach as it has been foundational to my classes and workshops.

As much as what I am writing here might seem a diversion from focusing on my dilemma of the COV-19 shutdown, it is extremely on point.

My own dilemma within the context of the COV-19 lockdown was that I was paralyzed from the shock of isolation and the tangible cultural support that had served as a source of inspiration. The cultural context had served to structure my time as well as define the strategies I needed in order to create new work. You may object by pointing out the vast cultural resources of the Internet. But the energy is different. In the screen before me, I sometimes seem to be staring back at myself.

I realized that I needed to rethink Time in the context of the lockdown. The idea of the schedules of artists and scientists (creators of new knowledge) has long been of interest of researchers. For example, Beethoven's regimine was as follows:

His approach was very disciplined. At breakfast he counted the number of beans for coffee: exactly 60 were needed to make the perfect cup. The breakout came at 4:45 p.m. when he would take long walks while sketching out ideas.

Mozart's schedule was somewhat more frenetic:

Mozart had to build his creative life around employment to serve as the musician and teacher of the court and attend to music for various occasions, some very formidable in terms of large scale music events for which he composed music and led ensembles from the keyboard.

In my teens, I strongly identified with Mozart (I composed a safety opera in the fourth grade), as well as George Gershwin, who fulfilled my fantasies of New York. Both died at 35 years of age, and I based most of my life on the assumption that I would also die at that age. For that reason, I never planned to retire.

Looking at the schedules of creative people led me to research Daily Rituals by Mason Currey, an impressive collection of how creative and innovative people structured their daily routines... great bedside reading. Then I came across a reflection on the creative process by the noted choreographer
Twyla Tharp, THE CREATIVE HABIT: Learn It and Use It for Life. In this book she stressed the importance of beginning with Ritual, and her discussion of how it set the tone for the day deeply impressed me.

I realized that within the isolation of this Pandemic Shutdown, I needed to find my own way out by discovering a regimen that would help me out of the despair that was weighing me down. I loved the circle graph that defined Mozart's schedule. As I read the lives of various innovators, I started to imagine how my day should be structured. The circle graph connects to the earth, to time, to the face of a clock.

So now began my quest to find a way out of my depression by discovering how to re-imagine my typical day. I also realized that this structuring of Time was a dimension of Being. I recalled the improvisations of our class EXPANDED MUSIC that explored Time, Manifestation, and Being through open-ended improvisations in THE PROVINCETOWN PLAYHOUSE. Somehow this Pandemic was opening the pathway to energies of the past that now populate the present.

PANDEMIC PANIC: A VICTIM OF LOCKDOWN

After a whirwind of two days, drenching ourselves with the artistic energy of New York City, Lisa Naugle returned to California on March 10, as the virus that Fauci claimed was "not a threat" appeared to spiral out of control. All business and activity in New York City came to a halt, and within days a lockdown was in effect. All that artistic energy vanished as though it never was.

From the confines of my apartment I would venture out every 10 to 12 days to buy supplies from the market.

At first, I thought this was a wonderful time to get work done, and for a while I was able to convince myself that this was not much different from my life as a loner.  But I was discovering that I had so many friends that I could see, have dinner or brunch with, or go to a coffee house to write in the presence of very creative people who were using places like Reggio's as a haven for creative work and stimulating discussions...or pop into the Morgan Library, the Whitney, The Russian Tea Room, or see a show or opera almost spontaneously when I needed a boost to my perspective on life.

That creative milieu was removed overnight, and it appeared that no one had calculated the consequences of such an unprecedented, catastrophic compromise.

I began to understand that I was in a state of shock, withdrawal, and depression. The day lost its shape, and I lost all sense of day and night. I could not sleep. All sense of a sleep cycle was lost. I was becoming more and more depressed because all this luxury of time on my hands was not being converted into any productive activity. I was starting to lose it...

I was in LOCKDOWN... I was in SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, UNDER HOUSE ARREST, with all these talking heads on television who seemed to bicker back and forth on nothing of consequence whatsoever, except to remind us of what we could NOT do... that we were being watched... KEEP YOUR DISTANCE... WEAR YOUR FACEMASK! STAY INSIDE!... THEY seemed to be making "lists of whose naughty and nice" ... but it wasn't Santa... it was Governors and Mayors and bureaucrats who believed they had the power to make laws and conduct invasive surveillance without our consent... and then there emerged a sense of despair of media in collusion with so-called government... so that it seemed there was no end in sight... there appeared to be some perverted delight that lockdown was essential and must continue for "because it's good for you."

April tumbled end-over-end, out of control... my lack of sleep had filled my brain with the fog of despair. Easter loomed and passed as a non-event. Early spring days were filled with sunlight, with passing storms and sometimes very strong winds, even a tornado warning for NYC.

As May approached, my lack of sleep had become alarming. I was a victim of LOCKDOWN. And I knew I was not alone. Every email and message proclaimed everything was OK... and so did I also put on an air of survival mode mentality. But we all knew and know that everything was not well. The globe has entered an unprecedented era, far worse than the GREAT DEPRESSION...Worse because it has been a government-imposed shutdown based on faulty data and flawed projections.

Night and day merged without distinctive boundaries. With all this personal freedom of time on my hands, nothing was being accomplished. The end of April fizzled into May and I experienced PANDEMIC PANIC--- the LOCKDOWN has become an insurmountable hurdle... all imposed from within through the destructive energy of isolation.

I had nowhere to go. "Don't bother us unless you have COV-19--- we can't be distracted unless you are essential... " You see, some some of us are essential, but the rest are not, so those lives don't really matter.  "Since you're not essential, don't bother us until we say it's okay to come out."

I realized that I had begun to see myself as a victim, and there appeared to be no way out. I needed to find THE WAY.... and I thought of Neil Diamond's song THE WAY... and his plaintiff face out: "I need to find...I need to find...I need to find..."
                                                            FADE OUT

PRE-PANDEMIA: RESEARCH AS LIVED EXPERIENCE

My collaborateur, Lisa Naugle of UCI Irvine, had heard of a virus that was beginning to insinuate itself in people's lives in early March (2020), and had been planning to visit me so that we might use a couple of days to research venues to stimulate our thinking and discussions about future collaborative work. We have worked together, collaborating for many years as we toured Europe each spring with Maestro Dinu Ghezzo, the mentor of us all.

Lisa called to ask if I was uncomfortable with her coming since there were these rumors of a serious outbreak of a new virus. Yet, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the CDC had recently commented it was not something to be too concerned about---"not a major threat"--- and Nancy Pelosi was encouraging everyone to go to China Town. I remember several viruses from the past, including the Pandemic of 1968 which peaked in 1969 during the Woodstock Festival, so I was not worried that things were so serious that Lisa should change her plans to visit.

On the day she was scheduled to arrive, March 9th, the NYU School of Psychology was hosting Ted Coons' 90 Year Festschrift and I was scheduled to present. As I entered NYU's King Juan Carlos Center, the venue that was hosting Dr. Coons' Festschrift, I detected an air of concern among those who had traveled to be present to honor this great scholar, researcher, and educator.  Participants declined to shake hands and bumped elbows instead, although Ted, unfazed, continue to shake hands and hug former students and colleagues.

West Side Story (Spring 2020) Projection Amplifies Dramatic Tension

Lisa arrived during the evening of the Festchrift celebration, and we talked about our plans for using New York City as the backdrop for our researching performance resources to uncover new  ideas for collaboration. Of particular interest was the new multimedia production of West Side Story that had just opened. The production utilized techniques that we had explored ten years earlier, using media and projections to create an array of theatre effects in the NYU multimedia workshop IMPACT.  As a researcher pursuing phenomenology as my major mode of inquiry, I had proposed to Lisa that her visit would model Researching Lived Experience, the epic text by Max van Manen. My thought was that we might use her time in New York as a canvas to sketch ideas from our explorations that could lead to collaborative projects.

IMPACT Production: Image Echoes stretch sense of space

We were curious that techniques we had been exploring for more than ten years since 2007 were now finding their way to Broadway, including live video projection to intensify dramatic action and amplify the performance presence, adding a dimension of immediacy.  I had invented a term, "MoviOp" describing an opera using technology spontaneously to combine live and prepared projections, increasing the immediacy of the performance. This idea reaches back to Richard Wagner's gesamtkunstwerk.
Were Wagner alive today, he would undoubtedly be a film director in order to exert strict control over every artistic element.

ROTATION, multimedia opera

IMPACT (Interactive Multimedia Performing Arts Collaborative Technology) was a summer workshop at NYU from 2007-2017 that along with collaborators Tom Beyer, Youngmi Ha, Chianan Yen, and Deborah Damast, I founded to initiate college level students to the emerging technologies that were revolutionizing the arts in ways that underscored collaboration, spontaneity and immediacy. Indeed, I often referred to this new sensibility as the theatre of immediacy. We utilized the concept of Arts Collectives from the 60s-70s to congregate students into collective groups utilizing different disciplines and backgrounds to collaborate by bringing together their unique talents and skills to create and share new work.

Dr. Lisa Naugle became a part of IMPACT as the Director of Dance and Movement not long after the workshop came into being. I had the honor of chairing her dissertation research committee at NYU, and we had begun collaborative projects with other colleagues as early as 1995, when we were using dial-up modems to connect with the Internet.

Tom Beyer, Media and Technical Collaborator

Projection of different angles enhance presence

IF TIME REMEMBERS, prepared video with live projections

A crucial figure in development of projection and sound techniques for this new Theatre of Immediacy and Distance Collaboration was Tom Beyer, Systems Engineer for Music and Performing Arts in NYU's Steinhardt School.  Tom served as one of the founders of IMPACT, but we had been collaborating on projects and productions for a number of years before IMPACT. He has collaborated with many artists over the years, and was one of Dinu Ghezzo's major collaborators on the many tours throughout Europe. I played a role in bringing Dinu Ghezzo to NYU, and when I became the Chair of the Department, I appointed Dinu as the Director of Music Composition. I give this background, because it was this milieu of extraordinary artists that led to many collaborations that were constantly breaking ground and exploring new frontiers, attracting new collaborators that eventually grew into an impressive informal network of individuals coming together to create new expressive forms. Perhaps our greatest weakness was that we were always in the moment, and the pressure of production prevented our pausing to take note of what we had created. My philosophy was to document everything we did to excess. We created so much data that the task of retrieving it and attempt to reflect on our journey was utterly over-whelming. We were always on to the next production, the next experiment.

As artists, we were internalizing and processing our experience: we were the embodiment of our research. Thus each successive year and collaboration built upon the previous experiments and provided the means to leap forward by continually adding to and evolving the previous concepts and techniques into new experiments. Every season of IMPACT was a new experiment,

ROTATION, multimedia opera multiple screens

evolving from the previous year as we discussed the structure and process for the new workshop.

We experimented with the simultaneous running of two independent videos while incorporating live projections of performances, multiple screens, enhanced directional sound, connecting independent spaces in simultaneous distance performances.

During these years, we introduced so many young students from around the world, that we discovered (during our debriefing of their experiences on the final day) that perhaps the most important outcome for the participants in this collaborative process was they had sustained a transformative life-changing experience.

Our creative research as lived experience project of March 7-9 concluded with attending the preview of a stunning new production of Sondheim's classic, COMPANY, that starred Patti Lupone, who brought down the house with "Here's to the Ladies Who Lunch." The production reversed the genders of the original production so that the major premise was of a woman in her 30s who couldn't commit to marriage.  I found this production more exciting and inspiring than the original 1970 production. This new production never happened. Shortly after Lisa returned to California on March 10th, Broadway went dark and the COV-19 PANDEMIC pummeled New York City into a lockdown.