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 I directed Charles L. Mee’s Orestes for SITI Company’s inaugural season in 1992.  We premiered the work in the mountainous region of Toga-mura, Japan at Tadashi Suzuki’s International Arts Festival.  Soon afterwards, both SITI and Suzuki’s SCOT Company travelled to Saratoga Springs, New York, where each company would perform as part of SITI’s first U.S. season.  I invited the SCOT Company to the dress rehearsal of Orestes held in a five hundred-seat theater on the grounds of the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga.  The Japanese Company, with Mr. Suzuki and his wife Hiroko, arrived early at the theater and sat expectantly in the auditorium waiting for the run-through to begin.  But a technical snafu prevented us from starting on time.  Nervous and a little embarrassed, I climbed to where the Japanese Company was sitting and began dancing around, telling jokes and, in general, attempting to entertain the group while they waited.  Suddenly Suzuki’s wife Hiroko turned and motioned sharply in my direction.  “Shhh,” she said, “the moments before a play begins are the most beautiful.” 

With these words, Hiroko put me in my place, confronting me with my own fear of nothing happening.  I wondered if this is a typical American attitude – distrust of empty space and unfilled time?  And yet how can anything new be engendered if space and time is not allowed in order that the new event might occur. I do know that an artist must be capable of stopping time and allowing for silence.  A great landscape painting halts the ephemeral rush of time.  A play in production changes the time signature radically and can bring us all to stillness and quiet.  But to welcome the moments of stillness and quiet in one’s work, one must welcome and cultivate stillness and quiet in one’s own life.  One must find the capacity to be still with nothing happening in order to realize that in fact something is always happening, movement and sound are all around. Always.

Silence does not exist, at least not as long as we are alive and breathing.  But the leaning in towards silence, the welcoming of the gaps and dark places in between stillness and action, bring a great restorative reserve to our perceptual mechanisms and our sense of humanity.  Much like mulch in gardening, the stinking dead leaves during the silence of winter are transformed into the fecund conditions that produce sweet tender bulbs.  For the artistic process, the winter of quiet and invisibility is necessary for a burst of new life and expression to occur.

Recently in conversation with my colleague Brian Kulick, he mentioned that life is moving faster.  “Yes,” I said in agreement.  “Things do seem to be moving faster.”  “No, life does not seem to be moving faster, rather life really is moving faster” he said.  “Yes,” I said again, “life is getting faster.”  And again he repeated, “Life is actually getting faster.”  Brian is the first to admit to being fully part of the accelerated pace of humanity these days. He listens to podcasts when he is walking from one engagement to the next.  In the attempt not to lose time, he said, he misses out on time. 

I emailed Brian to ask for further explanation and he wrote, “ This escalation in time is in direct relation to our burgeoning technology where iPhones, iPads, Blackberries, etc. absorb all of our ‘in between’ and ‘down time’ to the point where there is no ‘in between’, just differing levels of continual engagement.  But these random minutes that happen while we wait for a train or a cup of coffee, or eat a pretzel and look at a building that we never noticed before, are all an essential part of the fabric of life, it gives breath and depth to our day; without it, the day careens onward with no time that is ‘outside’ of time.  We need those ‘outside’ moments, it gives us our sense of temporal proportion, our sense of balance.”

Brian’s words and sense of loss are well placed.  To stare at the sky until you begin to sense patterns in the clouds brings a certain peace to the soul and the spaciousness that is necessary to be able to land fully in any particular moment.

In the midst of lives lived in the constant rush of time, accelerating with every new technological breakthrough, I see the object of the art experience is to put a stake of eternity through the rush of time.  The point of art is to STOP time and space.  One feels in a great painting or piece of music that the world seems to stop and the listener or observer receives a quiet stab of eternity. But how is it possible to find silence and stillness in the whirl of our day-to-day lives? The task is to find the art of silence within motion. The paradox of theater, which is an art form that takes place within the confines of time and space, is the necessity for stillness and silence within the rush and onslaught of time. You have put stillness and a sense of permanence into the ongoing motion in order to speak intimately about the eternal within the fleeting moment.  This begins in rehearsal.  A rehearsal is always under the tremendous pressure of opening night that inevitably looms ahead.  And yet time in rehearsal must feel full of high-quality patience and attention.  To rehearse is not unlike fishing or hunting, where patience, stillness and awareness pay off. 

I recently began to study the Spanish language.  One of the first things anyone learning Spanish encounters are the two possible translations of the verb “to be”: ser and estar. Ser (to be) is a permanent form of being while estar (to be) is a temporary form of being.   While “I am a doctor” (Soy medico) is permanent, “I am depressed” (Estoy deprimido) is impermanent.  In learning Spanish it is necessary to learn which states of being are permanent and which are temporary.  But the grammar is tricky.  I find it odd, for example, that “I am a beginner” (soy un principiante) is permanent while “I am married” (estoy casado) is impermanent.   One would think that with proper study one would not remain a beginner for long while being married might promise more permanence. 

Nonetheless, the notion of the permanent and impermanent states of being is intriguing.  I wonder if we can learn to enjoy both permanence and impermanence at the same time?  Can we find eternity in the moment of eating a pretzel and noticing a building while on our way to the next tense encounter?  Can we do one thing at a time, placing the silence of winter into the radiant excess of summer?  Can the awareness of temporality and change be joined simultaneously with a feeling for fully inhabiting the present moment? Is this what we need to learn to do in order to negotiate the quickly accelerating environment that we inhabit?  Can the practice of theater teach us how?

When Mrs. Suzuki shhh-ed me in 1992 in Saratoga Springs before the run-through of Orestes, she made it clear that as artists and audiences we need to find the capacity to meet the event in front of us with spaciousness and a sense of possibility.  Both life and art can prepare us for the openness that we need to bring our histories and ourselves to the moment. Can we walk out of our front door each morning and create enough space to see and experience the environment as freshly as if we were on vacation in a far off land?