I was lucky enough to be able to ask Deborah a few questions about her work.
HR: Deborah, you are a fantastic showman, but contrary to the word "show"'s superficial meaning, your work is very internal. There is a lot about self-discovery; much, too, about how an individual artist communicates with a general audience. In the article you wrote for the American Folk Journal (citing Artist's Proof and Up at the Barn), you say you have to find your own self if you are successfully to communicate with an audience on stage. I'm interested in the relationship between oneself and other people/things - after all, that's what performing is: your own self, but on stage, for and with others. And if you have to be convinced yourself for others to respond to your work, perhaps also you have to connect with others' concerns to discover your own identity. "And when you know why the lovers sing / Then you're truly fit to be a King..."
So - could you tell me about how you found your own identity as an artist? Where might it come from, what from inside, what from outside?
DHC: Some songs I write are for myself, like 'Congratulations, You Made it This Far' and 'Never Too Late'. These are what you'd call 'self-esteem songs,' that help me make it through hard times. So when I sing them to an audience, I'm singing to them, of course, but by singing to them, I'm reinforcing the messages for myself.
Many types of expression are reflective. For example, I discovered that when teaching, I act differently than when I'm in the role of a student. I discovered this when my friend Natalie Cox and I used to trade lessons. We discovered that we had brain-access to all kinds of insights when we were in the teaching role – so we could point out to each other things that we might not see when we look only at our own playing. It was as if we each became teacher-minded when we took on the teacher role. But each role – both "teacher" and "student" has its own empowerment: each gives you access to parts of yourself.
The word "role" is important in my life. It's kind of like when you're a kid and you're pretending if you really invest in it, you can find and express parts of yourself within that role, that are harder to access when you're just being yourself.
Maybe it all comes down to the joy of interacting with people in different ways. It's one thing I love so much about jazz, and certain kinds of theater: the opportunity to constantly shift roles.
Where I found my own identity as a performer: I find that hard to answer only because it sounds as if I have found myself. I am constantly looking for myself, finding parts of me, rejoicing when I recognize them, forgetting parts of me, remembering them, reconnecting, disconnecting, trying to find new ways to connect.
As I write this, the vision of a river shows up in my mind. For me, 'myself' seems to be something that's moving, something that I can move with, when I'm lucky, but not something that I can capture. More like a river. Less like a lake. More like 'moving towards' and less like 'being', if that makes sense.
I will say that there are times when I am 'copying' people on stage. What's amazing to me is that nobody seems to notice! Maybe because they never saw the things I'm copying. For example, I really love Eddie Izzard when he's in solo-show-comedian mode. Sometimes when I'm putting my makeup on, I pretend I'm Eddie Izzard — and then I'm pretty sure I do it better. In any case, I sure have more fun doing it!
And I do that with the harp, too — I often pretend the harp is a different instrument to help me access a certain way of playing or even certain sounds. One of the things I love about this use of the imagination is that it is so immediate. I can immediately imagine that my harp is an electric guitar, or a bassoon, or a balalaika. What I experience is a reality shift: I'm playing a balalika, which just happens to look like a harp. What the audience experience is that I'm playing the harp ... but in a different way.
The point is that "my own voice" is many voices. In part, it's me embodying things I love – stories, ideas, animals, sounds, feelings, other instruments, other performers, other art-forms. In part it's exploring to find my own truly unique voice; and in part it's experimenting with character and role — both in my storytelling and in the music itself.
I also do a lot of exploring – take classes and workshops in writing and performance. I read a lot of books, and do coaching with other creative artists – though I never get to do as much of any of this as I'd like. And ... (shudder, wince, blush) I videotape myself whenever I'm working on new material – or improving old material, and as often as possible in concert. It's very hard to get myself to do, but when I do it, and do it in a committed way – tape, review, take notes, try again, etc. -- it is the best and fastest way for me to develop both my work and my own voice.
Writing "The Frog Princess" is a perfect example of my own struggle to discover myself by revealing myself to myself -- and also what can happen if you put too much emphasis on having the audience love what you do. "The Frog Princess" was a labor of love. The idea came to me at a story-telling workshop with Tony Montanaro up at the Celebration Barn. It took years to finish it, and when I did, I dedicated it to my father ... who never liked it. Almost nobody's ever heard it, Disney's now coming out with their own "Frog Princess" which has nothing to do with mine ... and yet I still love this project -- and creating it, recording it and performing it has been one of the highlights of my life.
HR: HEAVEN & HELL: I asked about these internal-external "reality shifts", because I have the impression that "What the Hell...?" (and much in your other shows) focuses not only on an individual's inner demons, but also on how the private self is affected by the world outside. Heaven seems to be external, won in a competition: your website describes it as "a metaphor for worldly success". Hell is more internal, the "kinds of Hell we create for ourselves". I suppose one has to send all demons packing, internal or otherwise, before one can enter heaven. Can you tell me more about what your Heaven and Hell are like? Is Heaven an uneasy one, like a reality game show prize? Or is it somewhere beautiful where everyone can go, if they get rid of their demons and learn to sing, however imperfectly?
DHC: I think that I believe that both Heaven and Hell are inside us - mental/emotional constructs with which we try to make sense of life. If Heaven could be a metaphor for success, that could just as easily be a description of Hell and therein, I think, lies the great paradox of the show.
As I was writing What the Hell...?? (and by the way, it's now in re-writes, so I'm still writing it), I often chose my own struggle with worldly success to represent the character's hellish idea of Heaven. Her idea that she CAN achieve the kind of greatness that would get her chosen for Heaven is what creates her Hell.
What she finally realizes, through grappling with the failure to be chosen, is that life IS the Waiting Room for Heaven. It's only through 'failure' that she's able to reconnect to the simplest and purest pleasure she has of music - singing a very simple song on a very simple instrument. So the show's also about Aubrey's relationship to music itself and the paradox of music-as-achievement: virtuosity, fame and mastery, versus music as a simple and universal experience, equally accessible to every person, regardless of talent or skill.
In this show, Aubrey achieves 'enlightenment' by giving up her struggle to be chosen for 'greater things', and makes her own choice to value, what she's always had. SHE chooses rather than struggling to be chosen.
In the beginning of the show, the question 'What are you doing in the Waiting Room for Heaven??' seems to imply: What's wrong with you that you're still just a Heaven Wannabe?? I find that a valid question, myself. But at the end of the show, the question means: Here you are. Life IS the waiting room for heaven. What are you DOING to really BE here in all the ways you can be?
Desire for achievement can become cancerous in the sense that it is one of those things that has an infinite capacity to grow, without regard to the health of its host. I'm always struggling with that.
I find great joy in achievement, but when I look back on my life's achievements I experience equal joy and wonder remembering the first time I wrote my name, as in taking a standing ovation the first time I played Baroque Flamenco with the Boston Pops. Once you get to a Grammy Nomination, watching yourself on TV and so forth, the sense of achievement is infiltrated with a lot of darker feelings about self-worth and anxiety. Maybe not everybody has that experience, but I do.
The genesis of the message in this play also illustrates another guiding principle of my life, which is that you can start from ANYWHERE. If you explore it or approach it creatively it can become infinitely deep, and able - theoretically - to illuminate everything. In other words, it doesn't matter what your beginning premise is, it's the way you explore it that leads to revelation or enlightenment.
For example: What the Hell...?? now has become very deep for me, but when I first conceived of it, I had a very pragmatic chain of thought. I thought: "Hmmm. I'm going to write a show I'll star in. So that means the main character is wearing a harp, so where would that look natural?". And I thought: "The waiting room for heaven! Sure! OK! She's the casting coach for Heaven Wannabes. Yeah, that person would definitely have a harp at all times." At first it just seemed like a comic premise I could enjoy writing about. But as I wrote, it got closer and closer to my core.
HR: I think it's great that "What the Hell...??" was staged around the need for a reason for a woman to be on stage with a harp. With some harp shows, I feel the harp is there WITHOUT a reason - for example, I'm generally into electronic music, but sometimes think "all this music could be done by the guy with the laptop at the back of the stage. Why is the harp here?".
Mike writes on your website that you're "forging a path for musicians striving to not merely represent their instrument, but finding a way to make their instrument represent themselves - who they are." And then I was reading the article you wrote about the harp and jazz, where you said you liked the harp for its mechanics, and that it was jazz that tuned into this aspect of the harp, and made you love the harp. I was also interested to read what you said about Tony Montanaro and "physical eloquence," dropping cliches of his art form and focusing on its essential qualities. So...could you tell me some more about your relationship with the harp, with its cliches and with its essential qualities? To what extent have you shaped the harp, and the harp shaped you?
I believe BOTH that it is essential to explore everything that THIS instrument can do, its full voice, AND that it's essential to ignore everything I think this instrument can do, and grapple with it to express MY voice. I see this image of a fight to the death: me and the harp. We're locked in a death-embrace that is deadly serious, deeply liberating and very funny. I see this flurry of fighting, like a cartoon, and one of us comes out on top. Maybe I learn to sing 'Danny Boy' (this is what the harp wants) ...then there's another huge struggle (dust, blood, sweat); this time I come out on top and the harp wails on the Blues. And so it goes on, our struggle together expanding each of us.
And I shouldn't say I come out 'on top': I should say we struggle in each other's arms (I honestly see this like a cartoon), bending each other around like pretzels and then one of us plays the other. And in this way we expand each other.
Moreover, I believe that juxtaposing these contradictory views is the best way to get at the truth of what it means to me to play the harp.
The harp's essential qualities: I was playing Dictionary with my family once, when I discovered the word "Noumenon": "a thing in itself, separate from its physical existence." That moment was a hammer-on-the-head, lightbulb-turns-on moment for me. A moment of discovery that I keep discovering over and over again, in many different things, and one of those things is the harp.
A second piece of that same puzzle came when I went to see an exhibit of Picasso's sketchbooks. I could see him deconstructing the image of a chair by watching successive sketches. I could see him looking for what was essential chairness and what was more the cliches of chairness. I could see, at the end of the deconstruction, that the image still functioned with full "chairness," although it no longer "looked like a chair." After that, the value of deconstruction became even more important to me for finding both my own voice, and the voice of my instrument. Take it apart (an instrument, a piece of music, an idea – a life!) and figure out what it really can do, versus the more limited things it's become accustomed to doing.
LEFT TURN: There are moments when I become completely focused on something (like the Picasso sketchbooks) and suddenly I am powerfully grabbed - it's like the world opens up one more notch. This happened to me the first time I heard Debussy's La Mer at age 10, which was the beginning of my
commitment to be a composer - but it's happened at many other times in other ways. A door is open that did not exist before.
I believe we each have access to doors of experience, of awareness, of perception and that we each have access to different doors. We perform, we talk to each other, we teach, we take classes, to find those doors, or to open them for other people. The ultimate goal (if I believed in an ultimate goal), is for us to open all these doors for each other, to expand our understanding of life: both on a basic nuts-and-bolts level, and on a deep, personal, existential level.
We open a door by being completely committed to what we're doing. It's our own passion that is the Open Sesame! - the perfect paradox of ultimate selfish indulgence in the fascination of our own work, and absolute selfless generosity.
ANOTHER LEFT TURN: I once had a friend in medical school at Harvard and with every semester he became more insufferably arrogant about the importance of his life work compared to anyone else's (particularly mine). One day, in frustration, I grabbed a piece of paper and I drew a line across the center. I said, "See this line? This line is basic health and functionality. Your job is to bring people from below that line up to that line. My job is to bring them above it. It's the same job, OK? Same job - just different."
An instrument exists to give you greater access to life, to give you another way in to understanding, another tool to explore yourself and your relationship with the world. Where the audience comes in to that is where you stop being 'presentational' and you simply let them see your own fascination with what you're doing. Ha! I say, 'simply'. It is simple, yes, but not easy. I study and struggle and coach and explore with that goal in mind and of course when it happens most dramatically, it feels like I wasn't doing anything at all.
People often ask: "If that's what you want to do, why not just play the electric guitar?" Many reasons:
A. It never occurred to me to switch instruments. Maybe that was a blind spot for me. Kind of like, when my Dad gave me his old car and my boyfriend totaled it, it never occurred to me to get a new car. I added a wooden bumper, had my mechanic mount Dune Buggy headlights on the front fenders (the standard car headlights were completely unusable), and then I took a paintbrush and painted the car Forest Green. When I started gigging on the harp, it never occurred to me to buy a more harp-friendly car. I took all the seats out of the VW bug except the driver's seat, and figured out how to angle the harp into the car. It worked! Furthermore it was funny! But it never occurred to me to get a new car rather to explore the possibilities of the car I had. I've always deeply admired resourcefulness as a human trait.
B. I was convinced, on a sub-verbal level, that it was possible to express myself with the harp the way I needed to.
C. I was - and still am - a big, loud person. I've always been worried about overwhelming people by playing too loud, being too big, raising my hand to much in class, singing loud, taking charge, asking too many questions, having too many ideas,and about being asked to "keep it down" when I was singing and playing music. Playing music is one of the most intimate and revealing things I do, as well as one of the most purely fun and bombastic.
The harp, at least the concert harp, was a kind of buffer. I didn't have to control myself because the instrument simply made it impossible for me to play too loud. The pedal harp is also very satisfying physically because it's so demanding on physical coordination, maybe more so than any other instrument. And the harp is my instrument because I am personally fascinated with the many ways I can interact with it, how physical it is, how directly I can connect with the strings, the pedals, the levers, how much effect I can have on the tone quality.
HR: Deborah, you are very funny, which makes me suspect you are actually very serious. Some serious comedians are not only serious, but also sad - weeping clowns...that's not something I sense in your work. I get the feeling your seriousness is different. But I'm not sure what it is yet. If you don't mind me asking, and if it's possible to answer, could you tell me what sort of serious you are?
DHC: Hmmm. Am I funny? Or do I find the world very funny? Humor is deeply important to me because it allows me to shift perception.
The juxtaposition of life as something more profound than any of us know and the complete silliness of how seriously I take things - slays me.
Humor, like paradox, helps me rub two seemingly contradictory ideas together to reveal the truth inside them. Hands-free cellphones, for example. It used to be that when people walked around talking to themselves, you thought they were crazy. Now you assume they're on a cell phone. But it LOOKS the same they COULD be crazy people. The other day I saw a woman trying to explain something to her dog, gesticulating, arguing. It wasn't until I got closer that I realized she was on a hands-free cell-phone, but by then the humor of her arguing with her dog was more real to me than the reality. I forgot she was on her cell phone - I remember the human-canine arguement.
I'm amazed that I can draw. I wasn't always able to. I couldn't draw when I was a kid. One of the most profound moments in my life was an art teacher stepping up behind me as I struggled to draw something or other, and quietly saying: "Draw what you SEE, not what you know is there." That moment was like a door into another world: It allowed me completely to shift my perception.
Now I often draw until something feels funny to me. And while I find it discomforting to listen to my own music, I LOVE looking at my drawings.
HR: You run a lot. I only run for buses. Please tell me about the role running plays in your life.
DHC: I never ran when I was a kid. I rode a bike, but only for transportation. In high school we once had to run a mile, or was it a quarter mile? We were in LA, where the air quality was horrendous. Running was a horrible, painful, exercise in failure and pain. A guaranteed esteem-drain.
At some point in my 20s a friend called me one day, breathless, excited, and said, 'Hey! I ran a mile! I actually did it and didn't die.' I was flabbergasted. How was that possible?? A musician who was able to run a whole mile?!?!? So I thought I might give it a try.
I can't remember the genesis after that, but running was always a chore and something I have absolutely no natural talent for. That made it both something I avoided, and something that fascinated me.
Some time in my early 30s I discovered I was having trouble keeping my energy level up the whole night when I played at the local jazz club, and I hit on the idea that, if I could build the stamina to run for 2 hours straight, then I'd have the stamina to play a full 4-hour set, and still end on a high note energy-wise.
That's when running started to actually mean something to me. By the way, even though I've always been a slow runner, I've always had delusions of grandeur. I've fantasized that one day I would stumble on the physical misconception that keeps me from running fast, and suddenly,boom!!I'd become a world-class runner overnight, surprising everyone.
So far I haven't stumbled on that misconception. But I've certainly stumbled on other things.
My husband is a marathon trainer. I heard someone ask him one day whether he would continue running if he weren't getting better. I don't remember his answer, but the question changed my life. Up to that point, I really thought there was a chance I was going to eventually improve. At that moment I suddenly realized there was a good chance I would never get better. It might never even become any easier. I would certainly never win any awards, nor be any kind of successfully competitive runner. And I realized that I needed to develop my own personal relationship with running that had nothing to do with my excelling at it.
That was an important turning point in my life: when I realized I could have a meaningful, lifelong relationship with something I just wasn't good at, and that I'd have that relationship simply because I wanted it — not because I "earned" it through accomplishment, but because I chose it, through desire — and simply because it enriches my life.
As I write this, I realize that is the very relationship that many non-professionals have with the harp, and it's a relationship I deeply respect. In some ways it's THE relationship I never want to lose with anything, no matter how "good" I get at it. This also brings me back to the show, What the Hell are you doing in the Waiting Room for Heaven?? because it's only when Aubrey finally relinquishes her need to prove herself, stops competing for self-worth, "gives up" and simply indulges in the simplest, purest self-expression, just for the pleasure of being alive -- that Heaven finally smiles on her — and that she's finally at peace. Her impassioned struggle to earn a position in Heaven based on merit and achievement is a failure. What succeeds is the simple joy of being an amateur in the purest sense of the word — doing what she loves - and that is her redemption. The one thing she'd always been able to do finally frees her.
