Do you like musicals? Well, there's a euphemistic question if ever I heard one! Just for a change, though, I'm not going to write about sexuality and social expectations, I really am going to write about musicals. One musical, anyway.
Do I like musicals? No, not really. I love some musicals (yes, you can read that as a euphemism if you want to) such as Rocky Horror, Hair and Cabaret, but most of them just irritate me. I find them schmaltzy, emotionally manipulative and about as subtle as a mallet to the head. The very thought of watching Glee gives me toothache.
I've recently been in a musical and, if you'll forgive the pun, I'm beginning to change my tune ...
Before people start yelling hypocrite! and throwing things, I think maybe a little explanation is in order.
In the summer I joined my local AmDram, Whitefield Amateur Operatics and Dramatics Society, thankfully shortened to WAODS (and which I take a certain childish pleasure in pronouncing as "way odds"). They had already been amazingly nice and allowed me to practise my audition skills the year before, despite the fact that I was over-commited and couldn't do the play. This time they were staging Hobson's Choice (Harold Brighouse) which sounded like great fun. So, I went for it.
They were kind enough to offer me the part of Dr. MacFarlane. This was perfect. It's only a small part (10 minutes out of the whole play) but he's a strong and distinctive character, which gave me something to really get my teeth into without too much pressure. It also allowed me to be in a proper play, on a proper stage in a proper theatre - something, despite all my other types of performance, I hadn't done since I was 12! I didn't know if I could still do it.
I flatter myself that I made a pretty good job of it, all things considered.
Then I heard about the showcase.
WAODS were going to do some pieces from the new Addams Family musical. I love the Addams Family (My friend, Becca said, "You are the Addams Family!"). It meant stepping right outside my comfort zone but, frankly, life's too bloody short to waste such an opportunity. For those who wonder what the hell could possibly be outside my comfort zone, the answer is singing and dancing. Yes, I can sing a bit, folk songs around a camp fire and so on but ensemble singing where you're supposed to actually be in tune was entirely new to me. The same goes for the dancing. People who know me well will say, "But, you bloody love dancing!", which is true, but proper dancing with real, actual steps in time with other people is a world away from the ridiculous, manic thrashing about I do on a nightclub's dance floor.
Unfortunately it didn't happen. The miserable bastards who own the rights got all sniffy about it and wouldn't let us go on. So, I thought that would be it for me until next year's play. WAODS were doing the musical version of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, and I wasn't particularly bothered. It's not a story that's ever appealed to me, nor is it an historical period I've any real interest in.
Not long after they'd started rehearsing, the producer, Nick, made a shout out on Facebook for more men in the chorus. The thing is, I like Nick. Maybe if I didn't like Nick I wouldn't have cared, but I do and so I did, and I thought, "What the hell! If nothing else, it's all valuable experience even if it's crap. How hard can it be?" Famous last words!
Rehearsals started off fairly well because were were told to be trolls, the sort that live under bridges. Awesome! Physical theatre. Bring it on! (Aside for anyone who doesn't know: Little Women features Jo March telling melodramatic stories which are illustrated by being enacted in a kind of fantasy world behind her) The song was tricky, partly because I'm not used to harmony parts but mostly because the top note was a whole tone above my range. I cheated and if Steven, our Musical Director, noticed he was considerate enough of my weakness to say nothing. I was okay with trolling it up and thinking that's all I had to do - even though it involved two of us carrying an astonishingly brave actress on our shoulders - until our choreographer, Shirley, mentioned the waltz. Waltz? Oshit!
As weird as it may sound, I find simple, repetitive patterns really hard to do. This is why I'm a much better folk musician than rocker. I can play a long melody with some confidence, but a two-bar riff gets me all confused after the third time round. In waltzing you effectively play that riff with your feet!
Fortunately Shirley gave us a short dance based on the waltz, rather than an actual waltz. It was more like a formal set-dance in 3/4 time, but that doesn't mean it was much easier. It is almost certainly the most terrifying thing I've ever done on a stage, and I never got all the steps right even once.
There was another dance too. This time it was based on ice skating and a bit easier than the waltz, although that doesn't mean it was actually easy. I think I got it to a relatively satisfactory degree by the final night and I'm proud to say that I didn't drop my dancing partner, Helen, at all. Nearly, but nearly doesn't count!
There were a couple more bits and bobs, but they were straightforward and very short walk-on, ad-lib parts. In comparison to the waltz, they were a doddle!
That's just what I did, though and, compared to the principles, I hardly did anything at all. What about the show itself?
Nick, fairly quickly, had us doing whole-show run-throughs at rehearsal. I reckon that was wise. It gave us (well, me certainly) a feel for the story and a chance to understand and engage with the characters - to care about the whole thing rather than just our bits. It also gave me the chance to appreciate just how much work and talent goes into a production like this, and believe me, that's a lot!
There are some remarkable actors, singers and dancers at WAODS and they don't give, or expect half measures. They're also really, really nice people! I should mention this because I'm a) the new boy and b) the only Pagan. Many of the members are Swedenborgian Christians who attend the church in whose hall the rehearsals are held. I am an uncomfortable misfit in non-Pagan company (I don't know the social protocols like "should I hug this person?" etc) but I've been treated like an old friend.
The sheer, demanding professionalism of the principles is something I'm proud to have seen. Remember that these are amateurs, doing this for fun. I noticed that our actors would push themselves a whole lot harder than they were directed to. This doesn't mean that rehearsals weren't fun though, I spent as much time laughing as acting, but it's the perfectionism that really made it.
As show week hit I could feel the tension building up. Not aggressive tension, "When will I fuck it up?" tension. That's how I felt and in many ways I was quite glad of the distraction of helping out a little backstage. But, I did very little, on the whole. I can only imagine how the principles felt. There is a song called Some Things Are Meant To Be, a duet between two characters one of whom is going to die and the other who knows it. It's a powerful, heart-wrenching weepie and it worked on me, who hates being emotionally manipulated, (although a different song got me personally rather more). In order to sing that song well the actresses had to feel it, really feel it. They tore themselves to tiny emotional bits in front of an audience every night for nearly a week, and then carried on singing and acting. By the end of the week they could barely even mention the scene without collapsing into floods, and yet they still went on!
How much respect is it possible to feel? I don't know, but when I find out I'll tell you.
I'm welling up myself here just thinking about it.
One thing that struck me was how many people said they were amazed it was an amateur production. It wasn't. It was a professional production without money.
The show's all done and dusted now. It was one hell of an emotional roller-coaster experience. I've been through the adrenalin crash catharsis, the getting horribly drunk, the weeping like a little girl and the hangover that lasts all sodding day. So what am I left with?
Valuable theatrical experience, certainly, but a lot more than that. Feeling proud to say I'm a member of WAODS for a start, and a feeling of being privileged to have witnessed such talented people do what they do best. The ability to say, "I was there". I've also got this huge, protective Walt Whitman style feeling of love for (when I really think about it) a bunch of people I hardly know.
What's next? Well, WAODS are doing Little Shop of Horrors next. I'm awfully tempted but I've got 18 weeks of acting classes booked with 3 Minute Theatre and I think I need to concentrate on that. After that, though, there's Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit, and just you try to keep me away!
Do I like musicals now? Hmm, tricky question. Let's say I'm a lot more open to their possibilities (which I don't think is a euphemism). I still couldn't face the idea of watching Glee though, at least not without a visit to the dentist straight afterwards.
Love and thespianism,
Seán
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Monday, 21 November 2011
Monday, 1 August 2011
Liber Malorum by Sean Scullion
Another book review. This is becoming a habit!
Liber Malorum - Children of the Apple is a fascinating piece of Pagan/mystical/occult "fiction" ... errrm, sort of! It would easy to take the lazy way and attempt to squeeze it into some sort of genre, but that wouldn't do the book justice and, frankly, there isn't one big enough.
Essentially, Liber Malorum is an anthology, collecting original short stories from some of modern occultism's brightest stars, and texts borrowed from more established authors and poets, and weaving them together as part of a larger story concerning the experiences and spiritual evolution of a variety of characters, particularly one Bernadette. The item they all have in common is the imagery and mysticism of the Apple.
The whole thing creates a weird and wonderful journey through the cutting edge of modern magickal practise.
Sean Scullion (aka Seani Fool) is an independent occultist and magickian, and a proponent of his own system of Fool Sorcery. As he makes one if his characters say, "Only a Fool would believe ... And I am a Fool!" The thread of Foolishness is what holds all the disparate stories together and creates a unified whole, like the thread which holds enough patches together to make a magnificent pair of trousers.
Those patches have been created by 23 personally chosen modern writers including Jaq D Hawkins, Ramsey Dukes, Anton Channing and Stella Damiana, and other patches are taken from the works of Starhawk, Robert Anton Wilson, Pete Carroll, William Blake and Timothy Leary, among others.
Such an unusual tome is difficult to describe, so the best thing I can do is to give my own readers a chance to read it for themselves by putting a link to the publisher's website, HERE. If your interests include what magick is and can be nowadays, I can't recommend Liber Malorum enough.
Love and Apples,
Seán
Liber Malorum - Children of the Apple is a fascinating piece of Pagan/mystical/occult "fiction" ... errrm, sort of! It would easy to take the lazy way and attempt to squeeze it into some sort of genre, but that wouldn't do the book justice and, frankly, there isn't one big enough.
Essentially, Liber Malorum is an anthology, collecting original short stories from some of modern occultism's brightest stars, and texts borrowed from more established authors and poets, and weaving them together as part of a larger story concerning the experiences and spiritual evolution of a variety of characters, particularly one Bernadette. The item they all have in common is the imagery and mysticism of the Apple.
The whole thing creates a weird and wonderful journey through the cutting edge of modern magickal practise.
Sean Scullion (aka Seani Fool) is an independent occultist and magickian, and a proponent of his own system of Fool Sorcery. As he makes one if his characters say, "Only a Fool would believe ... And I am a Fool!" The thread of Foolishness is what holds all the disparate stories together and creates a unified whole, like the thread which holds enough patches together to make a magnificent pair of trousers.
Those patches have been created by 23 personally chosen modern writers including Jaq D Hawkins, Ramsey Dukes, Anton Channing and Stella Damiana, and other patches are taken from the works of Starhawk, Robert Anton Wilson, Pete Carroll, William Blake and Timothy Leary, among others.
Such an unusual tome is difficult to describe, so the best thing I can do is to give my own readers a chance to read it for themselves by putting a link to the publisher's website, HERE. If your interests include what magick is and can be nowadays, I can't recommend Liber Malorum enough.
Love and Apples,
Seán
Friday, 6 May 2011
Sex at Dawn
There's a problem with writing a blog of opinions as opposed to, say, a diary. When you've said all the things that are important to you it's hard to find anything else to say without repeating yourself. I do so hate repeating myself! In consequence, I haven't written on here for well over six months.
Here's something I've never done before, though: A book review. It's by a psychologist called Christopher Ryan and a psychiatrist called Cacilda Jethá, and it's called,
Sex at Dawn, I feel, is going to become a very important book, partly because it's so radical but also because it's so accessible. I'm not naturally academic, and dense, heavy reading gives me a a headache, which is why I feel qualified to write a review - because I could read and actually understand it without having to go over paragraphs several times out loud!
Unfortunately, Sex at Dawn isn't available in the UK yet, although the lovely people at Waterstones are very accommodating if you don't mind waiting. You can always try Amazon, I suppose, but I prefer personal interaction. That's sort of what the book is about.
The main premise is very simple and something I believe already - that the basic assumptions we hold as a society about prehistoric life and human sexuality are wrong. The book explains why better than I can. You can even look up bits on their website.
What's Wrong?
The first couple of sections look at what sort of ape we are, and what sort of pre-farming societies still survive.
Genetically we're almost identical to two of the great apes, chimpanzees and bonobos - sharing 98.4% of our DNA. Evolutionary science has always looked at chimps to gain clues about our earliest behaviour, but there's absolutely no reason why bonobos shouldn't be equally studied, or perhaps even more.
I like bonobos and have written about them before, here. Looking at bonobos rather than chimps shows a society based on co-operation rather than competition, where sex is used for pleasure and social bonding and infanticide is unknown.
They've also come up with a wonderful new word, Flintstonization. Briefly, we have a powerful tendency to assume our own way of life is "normal" and apply that pattern to other times and societies. In other words we imagine that Stone Age life was a bit like the Flintstones in that monogamy and male dominance were the norm - but without any real evidence. In fact there are multiple societies in existence even now which simply don't fit that pattern.
Prehistory
There's a section in the book which looks at our assumptions of stone-age hunter-gather life, and questions whether it really was, as Hobbes said, poor, nasty, brutish and short. The writers put forward some telling arguments, that I make no apologies for stealing here:
Poor? The pre-agricultural human population was less than a billion people. Food was (generally) extremely plentiful and the diet was far wider than our own modern diet. Hunter-gather people almost never consider themselves poor and sharing is considered the norm. Wealth and poverty are relative terms.
Many archaeologists who have studied human remains from the advent of agriculture consider it a disaster for the human race in terms of health. We acquired masses of new diseases, suffered previously unknown malnutrition problems and (yes, really) shrank in stature.
Nasty? A human being alone in a world full of predators has a likely lifespan of minutes. Individually we're useless. We have no natural weapons, we're not big or strong or fast. On our own we're nothing more than a meal. In a group, however, we're the most successful creature ever. The point is that living in a pre-agricultural society (the vast majority of human existence so far) requires a group mentality, and co-operation. We're built for it, it's the only thing we're really good at, and it makes us happy.
Brutish? We're back to the co-operation angle here. Why fight if there's nothing to fight for? Food's plentiful, nobody owns everything because it's all shared, when you run out of stuff you simply move on.
Short? We're often told that people are living longer nowadays. It's bullshit. The normal human lifespan of "threescore years and ten" has been about standard forever. The reason people believe (against all evidence) that primitive people had short lives is that the ones who make such statements don't understand statistics. An average lifespan is NOT a normal one.
The average human lifespan has been increased immensely because of one simple improvement, infant mortality. In many cultures (including our own until fairly recently) the life of a baby was precarious at best. If a child could make it to 2, they might make it to 5. If they could make it to 5 they would likely make it to 10. If they could get to 10, the likelihood of hitting 20 was pretty damn good, but if they got to 20 they were almost guaranteed a full and normal lifespan reaching to somewhere between 65 and 90.
Biology.
There's some lovely stuff about human biology, and sexual behaviour in the modern world. Like the reasons for female multiple orgasm and sexual "vocalisations", and the weird shape of the human penis and unusually large testicles (for an ape). Also there's a surprising amount of evidence about how having an affair is good for your health and your relationship.
A particular question which struck me was why, if monogamy is the natural state for people, adultery is so common. Even in those sick and uncivilised countries where it's punishable by death, adultery is incredibly common.
It's tempting to quote the whole book, but I wanted to keep this fairly short and simple. I also want to encourage people to read it because I haven't made the arguments they have, I've just stated a few bits and pieces.
Essentially what they are stating is that monogamy is a patriarchal social construct which they believe began when we started farming. Previously human society consisted mostly of nomadic groups of a hundred or more individuals who worked in a female-dominated and totally co-operative manner, sharing everything. Sexual relations were multiple and non-possessive, children being brought up by the tribe as a whole. We haven't evolved our sexuality to cope with our modern lives because we simply haven't had time, we've just attempted to force it into new patterns.
Fitting it into now.
We don't live in tribes any more and we're taught to be sexually possessive from a very early age. It's inherent in our culture, but really it's unnatural. So two methods are considered as possible aids to human harmony. One is polyamory (look here for my views on that) and the other is that we start to take sex less seriously - a one-night stand isn't a betrayal, it's just a bit of fun.
Personally, I don't believe monogamy is natural either, but we do a lot of things which aren't natural - I wear spectacles! We just need to accept that if we do something which isn't natural for us we'll have consequences to deal with. Shaving is unnatural and has the consequence of blocked hair follicles and sensitive skin. Monogamy's consequences are a bit more wide-ranging and complex.
Sex isn't simply for creating children. This much seems to me (if not, apparently, to evolutionary psychologists) blatantly obvious. If the opposite were true we'd only be interested in sex when it was possible to conceive.
Yet humans are hypersexual. We're at it all the time, even more than our old friends the bonobos. We have even created ways of enjoying sex so that we can't possibly conceive, which seems the opposite of evolutionary psychology.
I'm going to leave with a quote from the book which I think is a beautiful attitude to sex and to society. There are tribes in the Amazon who believe that a child is made of accumulated semen. A woman will keep on having sex during pregnancy so that her child grows strong and develops well. If she were to stop the child would, they believe, stop growing.
Here's something I've never done before, though: A book review. It's by a psychologist called Christopher Ryan and a psychiatrist called Cacilda Jethá, and it's called,
SEX AT DAWN
Sex at Dawn, I feel, is going to become a very important book, partly because it's so radical but also because it's so accessible. I'm not naturally academic, and dense, heavy reading gives me a a headache, which is why I feel qualified to write a review - because I could read and actually understand it without having to go over paragraphs several times out loud!
Unfortunately, Sex at Dawn isn't available in the UK yet, although the lovely people at Waterstones are very accommodating if you don't mind waiting. You can always try Amazon, I suppose, but I prefer personal interaction. That's sort of what the book is about.
The main premise is very simple and something I believe already - that the basic assumptions we hold as a society about prehistoric life and human sexuality are wrong. The book explains why better than I can. You can even look up bits on their website.
What's Wrong?
The first couple of sections look at what sort of ape we are, and what sort of pre-farming societies still survive.
Genetically we're almost identical to two of the great apes, chimpanzees and bonobos - sharing 98.4% of our DNA. Evolutionary science has always looked at chimps to gain clues about our earliest behaviour, but there's absolutely no reason why bonobos shouldn't be equally studied, or perhaps even more.
I like bonobos and have written about them before, here. Looking at bonobos rather than chimps shows a society based on co-operation rather than competition, where sex is used for pleasure and social bonding and infanticide is unknown.
They've also come up with a wonderful new word, Flintstonization. Briefly, we have a powerful tendency to assume our own way of life is "normal" and apply that pattern to other times and societies. In other words we imagine that Stone Age life was a bit like the Flintstones in that monogamy and male dominance were the norm - but without any real evidence. In fact there are multiple societies in existence even now which simply don't fit that pattern.
Prehistory
There's a section in the book which looks at our assumptions of stone-age hunter-gather life, and questions whether it really was, as Hobbes said, poor, nasty, brutish and short. The writers put forward some telling arguments, that I make no apologies for stealing here:
Poor? The pre-agricultural human population was less than a billion people. Food was (generally) extremely plentiful and the diet was far wider than our own modern diet. Hunter-gather people almost never consider themselves poor and sharing is considered the norm. Wealth and poverty are relative terms.
Many archaeologists who have studied human remains from the advent of agriculture consider it a disaster for the human race in terms of health. We acquired masses of new diseases, suffered previously unknown malnutrition problems and (yes, really) shrank in stature.
Nasty? A human being alone in a world full of predators has a likely lifespan of minutes. Individually we're useless. We have no natural weapons, we're not big or strong or fast. On our own we're nothing more than a meal. In a group, however, we're the most successful creature ever. The point is that living in a pre-agricultural society (the vast majority of human existence so far) requires a group mentality, and co-operation. We're built for it, it's the only thing we're really good at, and it makes us happy.
Brutish? We're back to the co-operation angle here. Why fight if there's nothing to fight for? Food's plentiful, nobody owns everything because it's all shared, when you run out of stuff you simply move on.
Short? We're often told that people are living longer nowadays. It's bullshit. The normal human lifespan of "threescore years and ten" has been about standard forever. The reason people believe (against all evidence) that primitive people had short lives is that the ones who make such statements don't understand statistics. An average lifespan is NOT a normal one.
The average human lifespan has been increased immensely because of one simple improvement, infant mortality. In many cultures (including our own until fairly recently) the life of a baby was precarious at best. If a child could make it to 2, they might make it to 5. If they could make it to 5 they would likely make it to 10. If they could get to 10, the likelihood of hitting 20 was pretty damn good, but if they got to 20 they were almost guaranteed a full and normal lifespan reaching to somewhere between 65 and 90.
Biology.
There's some lovely stuff about human biology, and sexual behaviour in the modern world. Like the reasons for female multiple orgasm and sexual "vocalisations", and the weird shape of the human penis and unusually large testicles (for an ape). Also there's a surprising amount of evidence about how having an affair is good for your health and your relationship.
A particular question which struck me was why, if monogamy is the natural state for people, adultery is so common. Even in those sick and uncivilised countries where it's punishable by death, adultery is incredibly common.
It's tempting to quote the whole book, but I wanted to keep this fairly short and simple. I also want to encourage people to read it because I haven't made the arguments they have, I've just stated a few bits and pieces.
Essentially what they are stating is that monogamy is a patriarchal social construct which they believe began when we started farming. Previously human society consisted mostly of nomadic groups of a hundred or more individuals who worked in a female-dominated and totally co-operative manner, sharing everything. Sexual relations were multiple and non-possessive, children being brought up by the tribe as a whole. We haven't evolved our sexuality to cope with our modern lives because we simply haven't had time, we've just attempted to force it into new patterns.
Fitting it into now.
We don't live in tribes any more and we're taught to be sexually possessive from a very early age. It's inherent in our culture, but really it's unnatural. So two methods are considered as possible aids to human harmony. One is polyamory (look here for my views on that) and the other is that we start to take sex less seriously - a one-night stand isn't a betrayal, it's just a bit of fun.
Personally, I don't believe monogamy is natural either, but we do a lot of things which aren't natural - I wear spectacles! We just need to accept that if we do something which isn't natural for us we'll have consequences to deal with. Shaving is unnatural and has the consequence of blocked hair follicles and sensitive skin. Monogamy's consequences are a bit more wide-ranging and complex.
Sex isn't simply for creating children. This much seems to me (if not, apparently, to evolutionary psychologists) blatantly obvious. If the opposite were true we'd only be interested in sex when it was possible to conceive.
Yet humans are hypersexual. We're at it all the time, even more than our old friends the bonobos. We have even created ways of enjoying sex so that we can't possibly conceive, which seems the opposite of evolutionary psychology.
I'm going to leave with a quote from the book which I think is a beautiful attitude to sex and to society. There are tribes in the Amazon who believe that a child is made of accumulated semen. A woman will keep on having sex during pregnancy so that her child grows strong and develops well. If she were to stop the child would, they believe, stop growing.
"... a woman from these societies is eager to give her child every possible advantage in life. To this end, she'll typically ... solicit 'contributions' from the best hunters, the best storytellers, the funniest, the kindest, the best-looking and so on - in the hopes her child will literally absorb the essence of each.
... Far from being enraged at having his genetic legacy called into question, a man in these societies is is likely to feel gratitude to other men for pitching in to help create and then care for a stronger baby ... men in these societies find themselves bound to one another by shared paternity."
Love (in a prehistoric stylee),
Seán
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