Some Help from Anne...

Notes from Anne Bogart’s chapter on Articulation from and then, you act:

“By telling stories about the past we begin to imagine a future and find a language for the present.”

“Find your words that accurately describe what you are attempting. If you don’t find the right words at first, keep trying new ones.”

“Articulation is born from the attempt to create bridges from the realm of private suffering to the outside world….Fueled by thought and feeling, its objective is clarity. Words and sentences articulate but so do many sorts of action and inaction.”

“Aim for clarity even in an atmosphere of insecurity and change.”

“the frustrations of living do not need to make you ill; rather, they can be transformed into the energy necessary to articulate well.”

“I concentrate on my frustration, my random feelings, my fear, and my anticipation and put it to work in the art of articulation.”

“When we use the wrong words or weak words or abusive words, or assume that the words we inherit are good enough rather than embarking upon a close examination of the vocabulary, we are cheating ourselves of a wide range of experience and expressivity.”

“Clarity of intention and thought will help us to find the right words. Clarity of thought leads to clarity of expression.”

“Stand up and articulate what you are rather than what you are not.”

“fundraising can, in fact, be part of the creative act. Fundraising is an action that can help to speak a project into existence….finding support has become a more time-consuming necessity. But you can also see it as the opportunity to describe and redescribe your project. Fundraising is action. Consider the pursuit of support and raising money as a part of your artistic process.”

“The art of theater is about living outside of your own skin and identifying with the ancestors who empower you to speak. Articulate, describe, and redescribe, find you own words, finish sentences, transform the irritations of daily life into expression, point, signal in the face of the ephemeral, frame what you believe and say it well.”

And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate – but there is no competition –

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. (T.S. Eliot)

The Beginnings of My List – Artist Ancestors

T.S. Eliot

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Diana Son

Julie Taymor

Wally Lamb

Edith Wharton

Julie Marie Myatt

Harold Pinter

Katherine Mansfield

Anton Chekov

Ludovico Einaudi

Jackson Browne

Crosby, Stills & Nash

Mumford & Sons

The Swell Season

Anne Bogart

Cornerstone Theater Company

Sarah Kane

Don Nigro

J.W.Turner

Jackson Pollack

The Penguin Cafe Orchestra and Still Life at the Penguin Cafe

Counting Crows

William Shakespeare

“If you cannot say it, point to it.” –Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The grace of human life is not to lack insecurities, but to turn them to good use.” -Julius Novick