The Art Brain
“The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar”, to make forms difficult, to increase the...
View ArticleWhat Art Is
While studying at Bard College in the early 1970’s I joined Via Theater, a group of likeminded theater majors founded by fellow student Ossian Cameron. The company began as an active investigation into...
View ArticleThe Power of Sustained Attention or The Difference Between Looking and Seeing
There are always flowers for those who want to see them.(Henri Matisse) As a theater director, my job is to watch over, to pay attention, to bring empathy and quick thinking to each rehearsal; to be...
View ArticleWhy Training is Necessary
Singer-songwriter Ben Folds recently wrote a memoir entitled A Dream About Lightening Bugs. As a child during the summer months, he captured lightening bugs, also known as fireflies, to put into glass...
View ArticleThe Art of Forgetting
At the end of the day people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel. (Maya Angelou) Until a recent conversation with my colleague and friend Leon Ingulsrud, I...
View ArticleLanguage, Love and Code Switching
I find that one of the best, but most difficult, ways for me to learn is to drop my own defensiveness, at least temporarily, and to try to understand the way in which his experience seems and feels to...
View ArticleIntentional Civics Revisited
For his thesis production, a third-year Columbia director chose to stage T. S. Eliot’s 1935 verse drama Murder in the Cathedral in St. John’s Cathedral on the upper west side of Manhattan. For the...
View ArticleThe Illusion of Control
But man, proud man,Drest in a little brief authority,Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,His glassy essence, like an angry ape,Plays such fantastic tricks before high heavenAs make the angels...
View ArticleShining Light Into Dark Places
I am working towards completion of a new book of essays entitled “The Art of Resonance.” As part of the process over the past several months, I have been writing about the centrality of resonance in...
View ArticleThe Tentpoles of Our Future
I travelled from New York to London on March 11, 2020 carrying a small suitcase and expecting to stay for one week with my wife Rena. Now it is mid-August and I am still in the UK with no idea about...
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