Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Adam Szymkowicz interviews playwrights

And most recently he interviewed a personal hero of mine, Daniel Alexander Jones. This man is one of the most inspiring minds and voices I have ever encountered and I think you should all read this interview:

It stokes a fire that we (or, at least, I) sometimes forget to tend to.
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1 comment:

Alex said...

So some Youngblood distant past triangulating here:

Anna Moench and I both did the same after-school collaborative-theater-activist-y-artsy thing at a local theater in Baltimore when we were in high school.

And my first year in the program (was this the year we overlapped, Anna?), Rebecca Rice (who DAJ mentions) was the group leader. She's always been one of the theater makers I've most admired, not because of the work she herself did -- I never saw any of it -- but because of the way she taught and carried herself and moved through the world. And she died pretty young, in her early 50s, I think, a year or so after she led the program. I was pretty sad when she died, and kept those obituaries for a long time.

Well. (Come closer, grandkids, around the bloggy fire...) One of the guest teachers she brought in was none other then Daniel Alexander Jones. And I remember the session he led so vividly... I remember feeling desperate to put down in my little notebook all the things he'd said and done with us before I forgot any of them... He unsettled me, unsettled the awkward way my early adolescent self related to my own awkward body, pushed and encouraged and shifted things in a way that felt very personal at the time, even though I don't think I had any one-on-one interactions with him.

I still remember the way he smelled (wonderfully).

A year or so later, on some weekend afternoon when I'd taken the Chinatown bus into NYC and was waiting on a subway platform, a bit thrilled and awed by this huge city, I saw him, bundled up in winter clothes, and it was just electric -- my 15 or 16 year old self suddenly getting a glimpse of what it might mean to live in NY, of the people who might be there, of the kind of art people might be making.

Ah, youth. Ah, Daniel Alexander Jones. Ah, adolescent Alex, who still had a full head of hair.

Thanks for posting, Erica.

(Alright, kids, you can go back to your games now. Grandpa's done reminiscing and he's going to bed.)

11:28 PM

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