Yesterday was a long one-tech rehearsal for the opening of a new concert by the Li Chiao-Ping Dance company. Chiao-Ping and her husband Doug Rosenberg are longtime friends, and watching her work, and seeing the moves she puts on dancers, is a constant pleasure. She's not afraid to use post-modern elements of text and direct involvement with the audience in her work, and the metaphor of breaking down walls is both implicit and explicit throughout the evening.
It's also an opportunity to work with the lighting designer Claude Heinz, formerly of the Portland Opera and currently working with the UW-Madison's Dance Department. He is a consummate professional, and we've worked together enough over the years that I felt a comfort in the process of tech, even with dances that were new and un-cued. In the middle of a piece set to Mendelsohn, for example, he says "Do you recall...when she came downstage center, and kind of cocked her hip? Let's call that cue 205."
In most shows, a statement like that is rife with uncertainty. What do the lights look like there? What beat should it be called on? We need to go back and run it again, of course! (and at 10pm in a theatre you've been in all day, that's not a happy thought). But I trusted Claude, Chiao-Ping trusted Claude, and moreso, they both trusted me.
In spite of the fact that, for the first time while working with them, I was not using a fancy PDA with TinySheet; nor was I using my laptop (though it was sitting open, next to me, processing some digital video for a client). No, I had my mid-sized lined moleskine open, with a little book light clipped to the cover and my pen in my hand.
Chris, our board op, gave it a sneering glance during a break. "Well, that's an interesting way to write cues!" he said. "And with a pen!"
Don't get me wrong--Chris is very capable. I'm really glad he's there, because he can run both sound and lights efficiently and has vast experience with dance (he's the tech director for local troupe Kanopy Dance, for example). At the same time...he can be abrasive. The kind of guy who says to the lighting designer "hey, I'm not saying your palette is too bad..." and not realize the implied insult. In this case, he was disparaging my moleskine--and as my friends and loved ones will tell you, this is not acceptable.
I began to explain that I always used pen, since as a lefty pencils tend to smear, and was going to go on and begin to expound on the joys of writing in the moleskine, the paper, the satisfying snap of elastic when you close it up, the fun hidden things you find forgotten in the back pouch...but I stopped. It would have been the frustrating conversation of a gourmet with a gourmand. I simply let him sneer at it, shook my head at the green legal pad he was scribbling his notes in, and we went on with the show.
I've now got a memory of every move of this concert in my moleskine. I've got names, I've got the poses, and in between staff meeting agendas, notes on workshops I gave last week and the article on Lifehack that was published this week, there is dance. It's not just a notebook, it's the record of my life.
So don't demean it. Or I'll show you some other things that can be done with stiff cardboard and an elastic band...
...today's article in Wired, and the comments, has some interesting bits.