Suzy Wizowaty's Articles on Lions Roar

Playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie teaches self-expression centered in the body and the moment. Theater, he says, is all about "the vividness of now." Novelist Suzi Wizowaty attends his workshop called "Writing on Your Feet." “Center yourself in your physical body. It’s less tricky than the mind,” says Jean-Claude van Itallie. We have gathered in a loose circle inside a large, screened tent in the middle of the woods, because we can no longer use the beautiful barn that used to be up the road. Six of us have come here to Shantigar, the retreat center developed by van Itallie in Rowe, Massachusetts, to attend his workshop, called “Writing on Your Feet.” Jean-Claude jumps in without preliminaries. He does not care for discursive chatter. When I had asked him earlier whether the workshop would include time at the end to reflect on the experience, he said, “No. I hate that.” As a novelist and a Buddhist, I have come with certain questions: What is the overlap between Buddhist practice and writing? Does having a spiritual practice change the way one creates art? Can creative work be a spiritual practice in its own right? The first thing I learn here is that I will have to experience the answers. Now we begin walking, at street pace. He reminds us to breathe. He suggests we walk through the space with a sense of exploration, of curiosity. Every thirty seconds or so, he reminds us, “Come back to your body. Remember your breath.” It is like having a meditation instructor on-site. At sixty-seven, van Itallie is slight and wiry, with white hair and sharp blue eyes and a manner that is both brusque and warm. He laughs easily. He is best known as the author of the important 1960’s avant-garde plays America Hurrah and The Serpent, and more recently as the author of the play The Tibetan Book of the Dead, based on traditional Buddhist teachings. He is intensely present. Later he will bark corrections during our stories, and yet, under his direction, within the safe atmosphere he creates, I will take risks I can hardly imagine. Now he asks us to find a partner. “Without using your hands, maintain physical contact with your partner. Move in any way you want. Keep your eyes closed. Remember your breath.” I hook up with another woman. We’ve never met before, but for the next few minutes, we nuzzle and slide around each other like puppies in slow motion. Because Jean-Claude keeps reminding us at regular intervals to come back to our bodies, it’s hard to get worked up about whether my partner might feel uncomfortable. No sooner have I begun to worry than I have to return my focus to my own body. It is an unexpected relief. “Now break physical contact and maintain eye contact with your partner. Continue moving.” My partner and I walk backward and forward and around, tracing a complex pattern on the floor. We wave our arms, we create a dance—not beautiful, perhaps, or particularly graceful, at least in my case, but authentic. Sometimes a smile steals over our faces and erupts into a laugh. I can imagine crying, too, but I don’t feel sad. Jean-Claude reminds us that emotions might arise but just to notice them and let them go. “It’s intimate, but it’s not personal,” he says. We repeat this twice more with different partners. Our connections may not be personal, but they are indeed intimate. And we haven’t even introduced ourselves yet. Shantigar is a center for theater, meditation and healing established on the land where Jean-Claude lives most of the time. (He still maintains an apartment in New York.) “What interests me,” he says, “is the way in which the creation of art, healing and spiritual practice are identical.” To this group, in this abbreviated workshop, he will not stress the role of meditation or contemplative practice. He simply incorporates its function and vocabulary. The name Shantigar—“peaceful home” in Sanskrit—was bestowed by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the Tibetan lama who did several personal retreats at Jean-Claude’s farmhouse in the 1970’s, including one of nearly a year’s length. Jean-Claude’s parents, Belgian Jewish refugees who’d settled in Long Island, bought the 470 wooded acres on which Shantigar now stands as a lumber investment in 1948. Jean-Claude was twelve. A collapsing eighteenth-century farmhouse came with the property. In 1962, Jean-Claude, then a young playwright living in Greenwich Village, retreated to Rowe in search of a quiet place to write. He began to renovate the house. He invited his friends from the Open Theater, where he was playwright-of-the-ensemble, to visit and work. In 1966, the worldwide success of his trilogy, America Hurrah, developed with the Open Theater, enabled Jean-Claude to buy the land from his family and the friends with whom they’d owned it. Although the Open Theater would disband shortly, a pattern was established: For the next nearly forty years, culminating in the creation of Shantigar, Jean-Claude would provide a setting for artists to generate creative work, in collaboration with others or individually. After our warm-up, we return to the circle. Now we are each to tell two stories—one of a childhood memory and one of something that happened within the last twenty-four hours. There are two rules: We must use only the present tense, and we must avoid using the word “and” to link sentences. “The present tense is very theatrical. Theater is all about now, now, now, now, now. It’s got all the vividness of now,” says Jean-Claude. That’s first. Second, running your sentences together with “and” tends to lead to a kind of automatic, habitual speaking. When my turn comes, I follow the instructions we have been given: I stand with my eyes closed, breathe, try to remember the centeredness I experienced during the previous hour, and consciously connect with the energies of sky and earth, above and below. “Take your time,” urges Jean-Claude. “Remember your breath. Feel your body.” Finally, I am to signal my embrace of the others in the room by making eye contact with each one. “It is your moment of generosity,” Jean-Claude has said. I am struck by how natural—how unawkward—it feels to look at each person. I close my eyes again for the telling. “I am six years old and I’m—” “No and. I’m.” “I’m six years old. I’m in a cabin in Bastrop State Park. I’m in bed with my little brother and sister and there is—” “No and. There is.” “There is a scratching sound at the door.” The effect of telling a story in first person is intriguing. I do feel more present, more inside the story. On the other hand, I can’t quite get at the fear I felt about bears in the woods—perhaps because I’m thinking about the fact that it was my father making the scratching. I finish my first story and launch into my even briefer second story. “I am in Jean-Claude’s kitchen. He has just told me the workshop is in the tent. Oh, no! I think. There will be mosquitoes. I am afraid of mosquitoes. Mosquitoes like me.” Jean-Claude interrupts. “Show us the mosquitoes.” With my eyes closed, I become mosquitoes. I feel furious and aggressive. I buzz angrily, jabbing at the air. My face is pinched. In my raging mosquito dance I knock over my chair, and open my eyes. My heart is pounding, my breathing hard. Oh, I think, so this is what it’s about. Working from—or with—my body takes me deeper into the experience than merely thinking and imagining. I’m beginning to get it. Jean-Claude has instructed us to clap for each other—“Applause is good.” He has complimented each of us in turn, praised our work, our creativity, our energy. He reminds me to slow down. “Think of the terrain as having holes you can dive down into. Take your time.” Later he echoes this with someone else. “Take all the time in the world. You have infinity.” Where have I heard this before, this injunction to slow down, to stay, stay? And yet, as we break for lunch, I can’t help wondering how all this connects with playwriting. How does one turn personal storytelling into drama—or use it to create fiction, or painting, or dance? In the early 1980’s, van Itallie was teaching performing and writing at Middlebury College—a class of each—when he decided to teach the two together as a connected activity. “It was the year the Dalai Lama visited Middlebury,” he remembers. Then Doug Wilson at the Rowe Conference Center invited him to give a workshop that “combines everything you know.” For van Itallie, a devoted Buddhist, this meant incorporating meditation instruction into the teaching of writing and performing. Van Itallie describes “Writing on Your Feet” as “a way of bypassing doing merely mental energy, merely coming from your head, which is spinning all these tapes. Rather, by getting up and physically experiencing your center, by closing your eyes, allowing the body to inform you before you speak, you’re coming from a place which is your physical center of awareness, your hara. “The words that you speak then are only the top of the iceberg. Someone writes them down for you, and there you have a text. The skillful means is allowing yourself to inhabit your own body, to use your body, your breath, to be fully realized in your movements so that the words come up because they’re needed.” But he had not yet applied this new way of teaching to himself. “I thought, well, you better put your mouth where your teaching is.” He began with a segment of a piece called Guys Dreamin’. “And then I did a one-person show with a wonderful accompanist named Steve Sweeting called War, Sex and Dreams, which was autobiographical,” he says. “I did it in L.A. at The Highways and at La Mama in New York, and it got good reviews in the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. And then I realized that if I could do this with autobiographical material, why couldn’t I use this same method of improvising on my feet with characters?” He wrote his newest play, Light, using this process. He believes it’s the best thing he’s ever written. Set in the eighteenth century, the play revolves around...

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