Fragments of Inspiration

Anonymous asked: i saw on a website that you did some work relating to self-harm and cutting? can you elaborate?

Sure thing! Check out information about it on my website: http://www.maggiekeenanbolger.com/past-projects/from-the-inside-out/

And here’s a link to the promo video explaining exactly what it is: http://www.maggiekeenanbolger.com/media/from-the-inside-out/

It’s a sad truth that I’ve been neglecting my little blog here. But never fear! The new project I’m working on, The Birds and the Bees…Unabridged, a devised theatre piece about female sexuality has a new blog that I will be sure to be waaaaaay more diligent about!

So follow us! And join us in a discussion about the most important issues facing women and our sexuality today!

The Birds and the Bees…Unabridged Blog!

Yep! That link! Right up there!! Why aren’t you clicking on it yet?! It’s gonna be a party! Follow us!

Julie Andrews learning that turkeys are bisexual.

(Source: lejazzhot, via ohheygrace)

chrisbattleart:

Actual poster from the mid-50’s issued by Senator Joseph McCarthy at the height of the Red Scare and anti communist witch hunt in Washington.  All artists were suspect.

(via ohheygrace)

I had a pretty marvelous evening last weekend.  As a part of my collaborator Rachel’s and my Female Sexuality Project, we got a group of female-identified folks together to chat about…sex and sexuality :-)

Now, this is clearly one of my favorite topics.  And Rachel and I have spent hours chatting about the contradictions in female sexuality, expectation and messages. We even spent a good hour looking at pictures of vulva’s online (if you’ve never seen it, you REALLY need to check out the book I’ll Show You Mine, it’s an awesomely empowered, not at all creepy book about the awesomely crazy variations of a woman’s va-jay-jay. Once you get beyond the initial shock of OHMYGODIMLOOKINGATPICTURESOFWOMENSVULVASINANONPORNOGRAPHICSETTING, it’ll rock your world…also, I’m totally owning the women loving hippie I am being by recommending this book to all of you)

Last weekend we got to chat about these things, not only to one another, but to a whole marvelous group of women with all kinds of ideas, opinions and experiences. We fed them, and in return they engaged in a conversation with us and each other about all kinds of things. 

It turns out, Rachel and I aren’t the only ones who want to talk about this stuff!!  Seems like there’s a need and desire out there for a challenging dialogue among women about female sexuality.  We asked impossible questions, grappled with confusing issues and shared hilarious stories.

I LOVED IT. And from the responses after the group, I don’t think I was the only one.

In the age of the internets and smart phones, it’s so easy to stay one step removed from people. It’s a lot easier to post these questions on message boards and have these discussions in sterile, safe places where no one will see you turn red or get flustered.  And that’s super important.  But actually being in the same room with people, sharing the energy and the nervousness, eating the same food, laughing at the same time, you just can’t top it.

I can’t wait for the day when we can put on a show that invites ALL KINDS of people to sit in chairs next to one another, share a similar experience and then get to discuss, face to face what it meant to them.  Hooray for the power of live theatre and hooray for the community it has the potential to create.

So, my job(s) aren’t things that are easily explained. My career path is…perhaps a bit unusual and, really, there’s no concise, neat way to explain what exactly it is that I do for a living.

This is never more apparent than when writers of articles about my amazingly brilliant and talented brother and sister attempt to synthesize my work in a few words. 

For those of you who don’t know, I’m the middle child of a theatre-crazy family and BOTH my siblings are performing on Broadway right now.  On top of being brilliant performers, my bro and sis are pretty damn awesome and lots of news sites have picked up on their stories and journeys over the past couple of years.  A lot of times, I get a mention too! However, the ways I’m described tends to vary.

I’ve been called an actor, playwright, “has appeared on TV,” and put in to all sorts of categories that may or may not fit my job description.  And here’s the thing, it’s not the fault of the people writing those articles, there really is no way to explain what I do.  Even I have a hard time describing it to people, and I’m the one living it!!

For school I was asked to write an “artist statement” which nicely synthesizes what kinds of work I do and why.  I am pretty happy with what I’ve come up with, it’s detailed, expressive and fills in all the nice grey areas of the stuff I’ve done.  It’s also three paragraphs long. 

I have a feeling that the hard working people of Broadway.com don’t want to have to put a three-paragraph explanation of my occupation next to my name in a photo.

Thankfully, in this particular blog, I don’t have to concisely pare my jobs down into one word. What I CAN do is give some examples of the work I do here, and you guys can take from it what you will.

So, yes, I do and have done a lot of things.  Here are some highlights:

Green Chimneys- Currently, I’m working at Green Chimneys NYC Division, an organization for LGBT Homeless Youth.  I meet with them 1-2 times a week and we make theatre.  We’re currently working on a forum piece (thanks Augusto Boal) where a character goes through a situation not unlike some of the challenges faced by the youth themselves.  That character doesn’t handle the situation very well and ends up being discharged from the program.  The catch?  After viewing the piece, the audience is asked to come up with solutions and interventions for ways the negative outcome could have been prevented.  The young people will be performing the piece to their peers and the peers will be the ones asked to change the outcome of the situation in the hopes that it will offer options and solutions for problems in their own lives.

I <3 Female Orgasm- Starting this summer I’m going to be traveling across the country educating college students about, you guessed it, the female orgasm.  Arguably the best job on the planet, I get to use my theatre skills and years of acquired knowledge about sex and sexuality, and use it to educate a group of people who, with the sad state of sex ed in our country, could really use some help. I LOVE that I get to focus on the “pleasure” aspect of sex ed as well as looking into the power dynamics, lack of communication and other horrifically ignored aspects of sex and sexuality.

Library Performances- One job that I’ve done quite a bit since graduating is devising and performing various shows for kiddos of all ages at libraries around NYC.  I’ve performed shows about winter folk tales, Irish storybooks and self esteem.  What’s cool about these performances is that they’re not your usual run of the mill “we perform while the kiddos watch” shows.  They incorporate a lot of feedback from the audience, asking the young people to think critically, be active and problem solve instead of just passively sitting and watching. 

Female Sexuality Project- I’m currently working with one of my favorite people, Rachel Sullivan, to put together a devised performance piece about female sexuality.  Devised theatre is essentially theatre that doesn’t come from a script, but instead comes from the ideas, opinions and experiences of the people creating it.  We’re working with a group of women around NYC to see what THEY think about female sex and sexuality. We’re taking those ideas and working with the women to create humorous, thought-provoking scenes around a variety of related topics.  Eventually the piece will be presented in a relatively-traditional theatre format with some nice interdisciplinary surprises thrown in.  I love working with interesting, insightful people with TONS of different opinions and experiences.

Now, these four jobs are only a very small sample of the work I do. I’ve also been a professional actor, arts administrator, dialogue generator, mediator, facilitator, activist, director, teacher and a million other things.  But it’s hard to choose just one that really encapsulates the breadth of the work I do.

So there you are!  A little more insight into this crazy life I lead.

Can YOU encapsulate it into a word or two?

Regardless of the work I’m doing, chances are good I look something like this.

I’ve always loved the saying: “Work hard and play hard.”

Thing is, I’ve never felt like I lived up to it.

Anyone who knows me knows that I have a very difficult time just doing normal people things like…watching a DVD.  Inevitably, in the middle of watching, no matter how engaging the movie, I will feel compelled to drift towards my computer to work on some emails, brainstorm some ideas or…ya know, write a blog post.

For a while, I cut this down to my inability to relax.  But I’ve come to realize it’s actually something quite different.

I like to work when I play AND play when I work.  In fact, I find it very hard to do one without the other.  I’m not the kind of person who comes home after a long day at work, sits in front of the TV and zones out.  Usually, I come home after a fun but exhausting day at work where I played a bunch of theatre games, acted out ridiculous stories and bantered with teenagers, sit in front of Hulu and watch episodes of television shows dealing with sexual fluidity that I then take notes on and analyze.

Cause here’s the thing. The work I do? It’s also play. The playing I do? Also work. 

I feel SO lucky to have found a profession where those two things go together so seamlessly. 

It has its downsides, playing is EXHAUSTING and always requires a maximum amount of energy and sometimes I do wish I could just turn my brain off for two seconds and watch a DVD like a normal human being.  But ultimately, I’m pretty darn content with my situation.

The minute my work stops being play is usually a good indication that I’m doing something wrong.  If I can’t go through my day and be transported from my own world into a mindset/emotional state/mood that is different from the one I started in, it usually means I haven’t been doing my job properly. And, if I leave “playtime” without thinking about something new, or engaging in a new idea or activity, chances are good I’m not feeling totally “played” out. 

So yes. Those of you who work hard and play hard, all the power to ya!  I’m jealous of your compartmentalizing skills.  However, for as long as I can adore the work I do and engage with the play on the same level, I’m pretty content with my way of doing it too.

I have a very tumultuous relationship with traditional theatre. Don’t get me wrong, I love the stuff. I grew up on traditional theatre, it was my lifeline to other worlds, people and circumstances.  I do believe that the main reason I passed history in high school was because of musicals like Parade, Titanic and Ragtime that gave me some sort of historical cornerstone off of which to base the things I deemed “interesting.”

That said, traditional theatre frustrates me too.  I should mention that, for the most part, when I refer to ‘traditional’ theatre I mean the fairly high profile stuff on Broadway and Off-Broadway. 

This past week I have seen three, THREE pieces of traditional theatre that have offered me incredible hope for what this field can be and do.

The first piece was No Place To Go. Part love letter to performer Ethan Lipton’s co-workers, part query to the universe, part protest to his company and country, No Place to Go delivers a hilarious, irreverent and personal musical ode to the unemployed. It’s a tiny show, one guy with three band members at Joe’s Pub and it is INCREDIBLE.  Lipton harnesses the power of storytelling and humor in a way that made my oft-unemployed heart go aflutter.  He wrote songs that, while so simplistic and easy, spoke to such incredible ideas that I am putting some of my hard earned unemployment money to buying the CD asap.

The second piece, and I may be slightly biased on this one, is Peter and the Starcatcher. Now, my sister is in this show, so clearly my pride and adoration for her trumps all objectivity I may have, but she’s by far not the only thing that makes this show great.  It’s a truly ensemble-driven piece where the props, costumes and sets are made out of cleverly recycled objects and a long piece of rope is transformed into cabins, stairs, hallways and any number of other things.  The actors work incredibly to create the environments of the play, offering magic that doesn’t come from wires or fancy pyrotechnics but from the cleverness of direction.

Finally, Once. I saw the movie and enjoyed it, but the theatrical version trumps it in so many ways.  The entire play takes place on the set of a bar, with only lighting and set pieces delineating a change of scene.  And the choreography is SO incredible in its simplicity, a single gesture from the actors portrays far more than flashy, 10-minute long dance numbers ever have. Steven Hoggett, who I am fast growing obsessed with, offers so many poignant moments where movement offers insights into things that verbal language can’t reach.  The actors not only perform but play instruments, creating such a rich, full audio on stage that I could have listened for hours.

In short, these plays have offered me a much-needed boost in my tolerance and acceptance for high-profile, traditional theatre these days.  It is my greatest hope that these pieces receive the attention they deserve and that they continue to alter and question the state of theatre in our country today.

If you’re in NYC, for goodness sakes go see these shows! You won’t be disappointed!

I’ve had a failure of a week.  In what I like to see as “highly uncharacteristic,” I’ve had a week full of forgetfulness, unfulfilled duties and letting people down.

I have never been good at failure.

In fact, at various points in my life I have gone to great lengths to avoid failure. I have lied cheated and done outrageous things to appear practically perfect in every way.  For whatever reason, failure is one thing I have had a very hard reconciling in myself.  Not in other people mind you, I have always understood and praised the failures of others, sure they would result in great growth and learning, but from me, failure was, for a long time, unacceptable.

One of the biggest “growing up lessons” for me was to learn how to “fail gloriously.” In my Applied Theatre program, our professors encouraged and invited failure, pushing us to try and fail and try again. At first I found this incredibly disconcerting.  I didn’t want to make a fool of myself in front of a group of talented, intelligent people who I respected and admired.  But, as graduate programs go, failure was inevitable.  I screwed some things up, made some bad choices, produced some awful theatre and survived.  I made a fool of myself and made myself ashamed and felt like I should have known better oh so many times. 

And now, I’m a pretty good practitioner. 

In a conversation with my peer seminar group on queer theory, a member of the group suggested that perhaps our plight as queer theorists was, in fact, to attempt to work outside of the normative structures in order to fail, try and fail again.  That failure was perhaps the goal instead of the thing to avoid.

The problem-solving part of me wants to scream at the helplessness and futility of that idea. Why would I want to spend my life doing something that I could literally never succeed at? But also, it’s kind of cool.

Cool because if there’s no fear of failure, then anything’s possible. If failure is the goal, than maybe every failure is actually a success in an of itself.

Now, all of this is really based in semantics and questions without answers, but I think I’d be a much happier person if the fear of failure wasn’t quite so present in my day-to-day life. 

I’m human. Yes, I’m usually quite responsible and efficient, but also, I totally fuck things up sometimes.  Like, majorly.  And, at the risk of sounding like a motivational poster, if I can learn to fail gloriously…then shit, I can do just about anything.

So, I’ve posted here before about LAVA studios where I go to get out my inner circus freak, tumble and turn like a crazy person every now and then.

They’re a marvelous group of women who teach incredible classes.

They also happen to have a very generous work study program which, in my destitute student state I take advantage of on a regular basis.  For work study I’ll clean the studio, pour champagne at their events and set up/break down their community-based shows.

Today I worked Magma Mix, a performance for LAVA students under the age of 18.

As an adult, I feel SO lucky to have LAVA in my life, it’s an amazing way to get an (intense) workout in while feeling totally engaged and invested throughout. 

I can’t imagine what it would have been like to have had it as a kid.

The ladies of Magma Mix come from a variety of backgrounds and range from age 8 up to 17.  The older kids help out the younger kids in a way that seems so effortless and not at all condescending.  Two of the students (one 13 and one 17) are now co-teaching classes and it’s clear that the students love and respect them both.  Of the pieces we saw, two were directed by members of the group themselves and they were all engaging, challenging and fun. 

And here’s the thing, when you’re teaching acrobalance, acrobatics and other physically demanding things to either kids OR adults, there needs to be a very strong sense of community, trust and safety among the group you’re working with or else it doesn’t work.  You can’t lift someone off the ground effectively without talking to them, negotiating what goes where and how, and staying in communication with them throughout. 

What’s more, in our society there is such a women hate women stigma prevalent in the media, news and every day life.  Not only are the Magma girls supporting each other emotionally, they’re literally PHYSICALLY supporting one another, lifting, being lifted, not only sensing the support in an emotional way, but actually experiencing it physically. 

And everyone has a role there.  Having been a part of many a ballet and gymnastics class, you either have the “right” body for it, or you don’t.  At LAVA, the bigger kids can lift the smaller kids, both are necessary for the pieces to work.  Strength is valued as much as grace and no one is left out. 

I love being able to watch the teachers and the students interact, I like seeing how the teachers learn and the students teach and how everyone ends up the better for it.  There is very little better than awesome women teaching awesome (younger) women and vice versa.

On the off chance you’re in the NYC area and interested, the schedule for their kid and adult classes can be found here. And for those of you who ever visit the NYC area, they have cheap drop-in classes as well! Check it out!!