“Keep the baby, throw out the bath water”*

*Frank’s summarization of the thoughts and wishes expressed in the opening meeting of Tuning the Air 2010 Season.

A Tuning the Air Journal

Saturday January 9, 2010

The sitting schedule at my place kicked back in, 8:30am on Saturdays before the day’s TTA activities, and 7am on weekdays.

On to Fremont Abbey Arts Center for the first Monthly Open Circle of the year. Primarily Tuning the Air company members, plus a couple of regulars, one out of town visitor – Tom (the Hellboy) who is in town on business – and Bill who actually showed up with a guitar! No newcomers today. This is something I would like to look into.

Given the mean experience level, I was able to dispense with some of the preliminary exercises we often begin with, and go straight to the good stuff. These are the moments when I suffer for not being able to sit in the circle myself, but the role is necessary. Good improvs, with moments of sheer beauty. Simple circulation challenges that brought out some wonderfully musical moments.

I did make one mistake that I felt got us a bit off track, and took a while to rectify. After the break we came back to some circulation challenges, and for these I imposed a particular tonality, rather than the “notes of your choice” we had been working with prior to that. I had been wrestling with the impulse to add this element for a while, at this point, but encountering some internal resistance. Sometimes that resistance is a signal that the impulse is a bright idea and should be abandoned. Other times, it is the result of an internal conservatism and a momentary loss of trust in my better instincts. The truth is, often I can’t really know which of those it is until I make the call and deal with the repercussions.

In this case, it fell into the “bright idea” category, and pretty immediately I could sense that the concern for the notes was detracting from the listening and connection that had been evidenced earlier. Sometimes, this is a hump that we get past through perseverance. Today didn’t seem to be one of those times. I let it go on a little too long, and began to feel that we needed to move on in order to get back on track. A little rock and roll rhythm work did the trick, and culminated with everyone on their feet.

Back to improvs and circulation, and the circle closed.

After the Open Circle, we migrated to the Wilsons for the 2010 opening company meeting. In addition to the TTA team, we had Frank along as well as Tom. For this meeting we worked primarily with articulating hopes and wishes for the direction the production will take, ranging from the practical and concrete to the far-fetched and (occasionally) metaphorical. The goal of this was to develop and begin to articulate a shared aim for the work this season. Very useful to have Frank’s observations on what we were expressing. He has a unique and valuable capacity to sum up what might appear to be disparate thoughts and views. Of course, having Bill as both our resident audience member and our on-call professional musician provided excellent and necessary insights. And Tom… a little like having an audience for our meeting. A supportive and engaged audience.

Next Saturday we will rehearse with the full company, and Bob will be in charge.

As best I can determine, I met Bob 24 years ago this weekend at Claymont Court.