This week I sweated. I moved and cried. I saw Berlin’s performance at the Wex, I spoke about emergent strategies from Adrienne Marie Brown’s “Emergent Strategies.” I spoke about words and writing and agency in dance and begun to look at three new non-precious projects I will begin. I’ve also met a whole new cohort of MFA first-year theater students which is exciting and different to look into the eyes of a discipline so close yet literally so far, it’s a 20-minute walk to the other side of campus and this week was usually through the 20-degree snow. The MFA audition was also this week which just seems like way too much for our first week back, but we did it. I demonstrated and it was really fun to see and help. 🙂

I’ve confronted my ego and my ideas of empathy and self this week and those ladies are tricky. This quote from Parker Palmer has stuck with me all week since reading it Monday and has seeped into other readings about community, pedagogy, Foucault’s ideas of panopticism and discipline, Hartman’s “Scenes of Subjection” and Fusco’s “Bodies that Were Not Ours,” Washington’s “Medical Apartheid” and Butlers “Bodies that Matter.” I’m not sure I’m quite ready for that last one, but we will get there.

“Power works from the outside in, but authority works from the inside out. We are mistaken when we seek authority outside ourselves, in sources ranging from the subtle skills of group process to that less than subtle method of social control called grading. This view of teaching turns the theater into a cop on the corner, trying to keep things moving amicably and by consent but always having recourse to the coercive power of the law.”

Authority is granted to people who are perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts. When teachers depend on the coercive powers of law or technique they have no authority at all.

Parker Palmer, “The Courage to Teach”