I recently chimed in on a question that a friend on FB asked about moving between disciplines, which garnered a whole bunch of great answers, from writers who not only play in visual arenas but also music and other arts.(and in fact someone suggested that really everything from art, from gardening to cooking to decorating your home.) As someone who has spent a lot of time with my feet in more than one field--not just the arts--it got me thinking about how I move back and forth and between things historically, whether it's just natural or intentional or if there is resistance and an attempt to readjust with each shift.
My first love, of course, was writing. Which started very young and persisted through my young adulthood with nary a nod into other things. I wrote long novel plots in notebooks in junior high and poems in my journal and geeked out over newspaper articles and English class essays. Words were the thing, That is, until I sort of accidentally enrolled in a drama class my senior year. I had carefully chosen my classes for my final year only to get a call over the summer from the assistant principal asking me to change something in my schedule that couldn't work. I'd intended to beef up my sciences and take a zoology class but it conflicted with the 4th year French class I planned on taking, so I needed another elective. As he rattled off the list, I sprung when he said Beginning Drama, mostly since it sounded like an easy respite from more challenging things like Trig and Anatomy. I had no idea I would be so into it.
I had taken a drama class as an elective in grade 8, but all I really remembered were some fun field trips to see shows in Milwaukee and lip-syncing Debbie Gibson's "Foolish Beat" on stage. Because it was a first-year class, it was nearly all freshmen, which had me often being the oldest and most favored with the teacher, who allowed me to spend most of the period not in class, but in her office grading tests with a red pen (I have no idea what we were being tested on( and helping to mend costumes. She encouraged me to try out for the fall play, which I only have vague memories of what it was about, but I landed one of the leads in a pretty small show to my own amazement. I fucking loved it of course, and as I dipped my toes more into the "theater kids" that year, joining the chorus of the spring musical, I had idle dreams that I should maybe throw my lot in show business. Which of course was ridiculous and the dream of every other 17-year-old caught with the theater bug, but it seemed like an option.
I was going to be a scientist after all, and if not a scientist, a writer anyway. And so I held these things like three balls in the air that last year. In one hand, my college plans at UNCW and an obsession with the sea, In the other, newspaper articles and essay writing and occasional poems. In the air, the glistening orb of chucking it all to go join the cast of Les Miz. Sounder thoughts prevailed, and since the other two, making a living and a career of them was so far from my frame of reference, I went off to NC the next fall, but still boasted an obsession with both writing and theater I indulged on the sides occasionally by typing drafts of stories on my electric typewriter and taking in campus productions.
When I landed back in the midwest, having cast off my pursuit of marine science, writing is where I turned most of my efforts, but I still would feel the theater bug churn in my chest every once in a while, drawing me to genres like dramatic lit and any performance I could find in the area. By my second year of college in Rockford, I had successfully infiltrated the theater department, mostly working backstage and stage managing rather than acting, but it was where my primary social group was, even though I was technically an English Lit major. I loved most the classes that melded the two, things like seminars in drama and theater history which produced my first true acquaintance with the Greeks. For a while I thought I might want to be a playwright, though I was no better at that than fiction. I was a minor in theater eventually, but I took nearly enough classes for a double major, including credit hours painting and building sets and costumes. We would have raucous cast parties and go on field trips to Chicago shows and had a great time for my final three years. When I graduated, it was lit I decided to keep pursuing for my MA, but so many of my electives at DePaul were based in writing for the stage. As I was getting close to graduating, I interviewed for a front-of-house and administrative job in a local theater company, but ultimately decided to leave the city.
Of course, post-grad school life can take chunks out of you. Theater was of course an easy one to give up, especially when working long days made it hard to imagine spending nights in rehearsals. Later, I would work nights, which made even seeing performances rare. Not that I did not use my skills, both as a performer and a stage manager. They came in handy for reading to elementary schoolers and later for reading poems of my own aloud in bars and cafes and galleries. My project management skills, while learning in a very stressful environment, made me good at them in less stressful ones like running a press and later running library programming with all the balls in the air. Nothing seemed as stressful after all, as live theater.
As someone whose partner is an actor (more film than live, but sometimes on stage) and as I watch from a distance, the directing and orchestrations of performances, it all takes me back, but kind of makes me happy that writing and art are less stressful. I loved theater in college, but I also was wired out, sick a lot, and just exhausted from late nights/early mornings. What I could do at 21 I don't think I could do at 48. Over the holidays, because I spent more time with J, I also spent more time with other performers, and though it was an adjustment to their high energy compared to writers and librarians that have formed my social group for two decades, I eventually felt very at home. Not enough to want to DO theatre again, mind you, but maybe to make seeing it more a part of my life now that I have a little more freedom.
As for the initial question, I think theater and poetry are not all that far apart, even the Greeks would agree. There are times when I entertain the idea of writing a performance piece for the stage, or a poem/play, using dramatic conceits and elements from live theater in written work. The idea of the verse drama or drama-in-verse. When I was working on granata last summer, there is a little of this in the chorus and other elements of Greek literature, but not enough to make it in any way a drama, but it does mean that that's not completely off the table. One thing about live theater production is that it's time-consuming and more structured as a group activity, so writing and doing theater like for real, don't mesh well, since both are time intensive, far more so than visual art in my experience. So doing both at the same time wouldn't be in the cards. But writing for the stage perhaps may be something that would be an interesting direction nevertheless.
(stay tuned for part 2 where I talk about moving between visual art and writing, which happened a bit later...)
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