Clams in Pakistan

The weather report in the English-language newspaper DAWN reported that Islamabad would be “gripped by thunder and rain” today and it’s proved to be right.  Kind of nice to wake up to the rain and the booming thunder, and being “gripped” by the elements adds some additional drama.  A dust storm is in the forecast as well.  Maybe it will “overtake” or “pillage” us.  One of the things I love most about living in Minnesota is watching the weather approach; I grew up where the sky was obscured by the mountains or, more often, the smog (damn you, Scott Pruitt), and so the weather seemed static (we’ve discussed this, Michelle Hutchison; the marine layer? Again?).  The sky here is not as blue and wide-open as it is in Minnesota, but it does dominate in a particular way.  It’s eerie to be sitting outside while enormous hawks (are they falcons? Kites?) circle overhead.  Keeps you humble, like we’re all prey.  Happy Sunday!

On a less morbid note, I started teaching at Theatre Wallay last night.  Here’s a photo of my students; they were remarkable!

And another:

What becomes more obvious with every class I teach is that we are all improvisers regardless of our training.  Only one student had taken an improv class before, and yet everyone did impressive improv, right off the bat.  This group was especially good at listening to each other and being supportive.  We played “Clams are Great” (you know, “Clams are Great”), an exercise where one person stands in the middle of a circle and lists all the reasons clams are great (“they wear suspenders”; “they speak English and Urdu and Pashto”; “they don’t feel the need to blog about every single thing”).  Everyone surrounding the speaker says “YES!” after each statement, encouraging the person in the middle to keep listing reasons why clams are, well, great.  Inspiration will fade, naturally (this game becomes diagnostic after about the third declaration: “clams are great because the knew their parents actually loved them”; “clams are great because they have genuine self-esteem and don’t look outside themselves to be reinforced by groups chanting “yes!”; “clams are great because I have always known, deep down, that I’m biologically a clam”), and so someone from the circle needs to jump in, tag the person out, and begin listing new reasons why clams are great. It’s great for creating an ensemble and getting out of your own head.

I always tell my students to trust their bodies in this game.  When a classmate starts to founder (or flounder) our shoulders move forward and we want to jump in and help them (unless you’re a sociopath: “Clams are great because they don’t care about protecting the environment and are willing to dismantle regulations so they can line their own pockets at the expense of the citizenry’s pulmonary health”). “Follow your shoulders,” I yell, and then someone will be naturally impelled to step in and take over.  Usually new groups will be self-conscious and watch their new classmate wither on the vine and dissolve into dust before putting themselves on the spot, but this class jumped in immediately and never let the clammer go longer than four or five statements. They watched out for one another with real energy and commitment, and that’s vital for improv.

A long set of paragraphs (with too many parentheses).  Here’s a respite:

Of course, there is value in formal improv training (please don’t rescind my grant).  Theatrical improv does require an understanding of strong declarations, intelligent choices, deep and authentic listening and a respect for the ensemble. But in order to learn all of these things, students have to feel free to take risks.  When my students were introducing themselves last night (they laughed at all the rhyming names; I wonder if “rhyme” means something else in Urdu), one man said, “I’m here to make a fool of myself,” and everyone chuckled, nervously and with obvious empathy. I told him not to worry, we’d all be fools together, and then spent the first hour of the class doing exercises where we literally said “yes” to everything that happened. During the debriefs (why did that game work?  what skills were we using? what did you like about the game? dislike?) many of the students remarked that they  didn’t feel foolish, that the games worked because everyone lost themselves in the moment and simply played (brilliantly, I might add).  My favorite part of teaching is creating this kind of open environment, sometimes at the expense of content (I’m trying to channel you, Michelle Hutchison, again). It’s a fine balance, asking people to be open and vulnerable and then offering them constructive criticism, and trying to find that balance is what has always interested me most about teaching. I fear I have a reputation for being an easy grader.  Dang.

It also goes without saying that I learned, again, that we have a very limited view of Pakistan in the West (and yet things that go without saying seem to need to be said repeatedly).  Maybe it’s the nature of our new, condensed media (if only Twitter were always pithy) or the fact that our imaginations can only handle so much complexity (I doubt that) or our unwillingness to be vulnerable in front of people who have been portrayed singularly as predators (see: Hawk!), but most of us–in this case, yours truly–would be confounded and chastised by the multiple realities of this place.  Am I making sense?  Here’s a sample of what my students said last night:

“I’ve never improvised, but I do spoken word and poetry slams.”

“The arc of this story (it was a one-word story about Rex, the vanishing dinosaur) didn’t follow the traditional pattern of set-up, building tension, climax, and denoument.  I found this dissatisfying.”

“This is all too simple” (same student as above; for her the class was all denouement without the climax).

“I’ve only done Tartuffe, but it was in Urdu” (apparently people do really care about Moliere, Shanan!).

“This reminds me of Gestalt therapy.”

Oh?  Me: “Here’s a game called Zip-Zap-Zop.  I think you’ll get it.”

I’ll write more about Theatre Wallay soon.  For now, I’ll just say that I’m really lucky to be associated with such a welcoming, exciting, unusual place. The scope of the work they do is mind-boggling (music, dance, classical theater, film making, visual arts and much more).  What’s equally exciting is the theater itself; it’s housed in a place called “The Farm” and was, originally, a poultry farm.  My dad sold chicken wire and other poultry supplies, so perhaps I am coming full circle.  We had our workshop in the central courtyard as the sun set and, by the time we’d played out our clam declarations, we were using flood lights. It was beautiful.

After dinner Sikandar, the night driver, took me up to a restaurant in the Margalla Hills above Islamabad where I met Safeer, a director at Theatre Wallay, for dinner. The place was glamorous. I had biryani. The wait staff was contemptuous. Everyone assures me that Islamabad is “not Pakistan,” just as Los Angeles is not America. So many things overlapped and expanded last night that it’s hard to pin down any one impression. Nothing is that simple: the Pakistani restaurant where we ate could easily have been on Mulholland Drive on a cool spring evening:

For the record, Scott Pruitt, here’s my hometown at its best.  Don’t mess with it.