How to Begin Writing Your One Person Show for Performance….

Have you dreamed of creating your own solo show but don't know where to begin?

First, some basics of storytelling:

     Why do we love stories and why should I create my solo

     performance?

There are infinite forms and variations of the story of our humanity

Only one person can tell your particular story and the world needs it right now

Compelling Solo shows all have certain qualities in common:

1.    Presence (both in writing and in presenting)

2.    Authenticity (both in writing and presenting)

3.    Transformational Arc (movement in which the protagonist is faced with an obstacle or problem and goes on a journey- either internal, external or both) to face the issue that is compelling them. We are all on The Hero's Journey every day, in every risk we take, challenge we move through, or situation we choose to meet.

4.    Right now, the world needs authentic stories as a model for how to transform ourselves and the way we relate to ourselves, each other and the planet.

5.    When you marry your life experiences with your natural creativity you will uncover your "voice".

Here are some exercises I have my solo students do to begin their exploration of stories and themes:

2. Write a Letter of Intention(to yourself and the Universe) about your show.
3.  Tell a five minute story of an event that changed your life
4. Begin an inspiration journal and write on the following topics, allowing your own inner knowing to guide you "into" your answers:

*What are my greatest gifts?

*What is my deepest knowing?

*How will I express these qualities in my one person show?

*Begin an ongoing list of qualities that you are currently opening to transform in yourself and your life.

*Write an autobiographical 8 minute monologue(1^st person Storytelling) about an emotionally charged day or event in your life. Something that transformed you;

Choices: The best sex, the weirdest thing that ever happened to me, my first love, in my family…., saying goodbye ~ Begin with one of these topics and let your imagination run free. Speak it out loud into a mirror or a tape-recorder. Allow yourself to connect emotionally to the story as your speaking it. Tell the details and re-connect with how you felt at that time in your life. Get big with it. Allow all emotion to flow…allow your body and energy to connect to your words. Embody the story as you tell it.

Excellent…. A great start…..see how simple it can be!

Hi Everybody!

Welcome to my new blog. I am an actor/writer/director of solo performance. I live in Santa Fe, NM and have been writing and performing my own solo shows for many years. I also coach and direct others in their own creative process.

I was trained as a classical actor at Carnegie Mellon University, Emerson College and HB Studios in NY. My original dream was to be a stage actor acting in other playwrights works. However, that all changed one night in Boston when my acting teacher took me to see a one man show. It was at the Brattle Street Theater in Cambridge in 1984. The lights came up on a man sitting at a desk, wearing a flannel shirt. That night, I laughed and cried and was completely engaged with that man's story. I sat there in the dark and thought to myself "I didn't know theater could be like this…I didn't know it could be so intimate…so real" This man was Spalding Gray who went on to become probably the most accomplished monologist of our time. His show that night was called "Travels through New England" and turned out to be one of the first of his amazing one man shows that allowed us, as an audience to get to share in his amazing "life-tales"

If you haven't seen a Spalding Gray show, I suggest that you rent or buy one. "Swimming to Cambodia" was probably his most famous and is probably the easiest to fine. In it, he tells the back story of his journey to Cambodia when he was cast in a small part in "The Killing Fields"…he went on to do many other amazing shows that I was privileged to see including "It's a Slippery Slope", 'Monster in a Box" and "Grays Anatomy"  (about a crazy eye disease he got and his insanely neurotic and hilarious quest to find a cure") My very favorite show was called "Morning, Noon and Night" and I saw him perform it at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe a month before he was in a horrible automobile accident in Ireland that would ultimately lead him to take his own life a year or so later.

Spalding became famous for doing all his monologues sitting at a desk with a glass of water. He never really moved except when he walked in and sat down and walked off at the end of the show. But amazingly, in the middle of "Morning, Noon and Night" as he was recounting the joys of late in life fatherhood, he actually got up with a boom box on his shoulder, slid across the stage and danced! He danced as if he was dancing with his wife, Kathy and their kids, Theo, Forrest and Marissa. He danced, awkwardly and at the same time, unselfconsciously. Tears welled up in my eyes and I thought to myself "I'll be damned; Spalding is happy"

The song he was dancing to was a hit, from the U.K called "Tub-thumping"….A few days ago, I was in the car thinking about Spalding and how different my life would be if I'd have never seen him perform….if I hadn't devoted my life to the art of solo performance and monologues. (you'll be reading all about this if you keep reading this blog!) Anyway, I was sitting in my car and asked Spalding if he had faith in me and if he could assist me from wherever he was right now in helping me spread the word about solo performance. What do you think happened next…yes! The radio….a minute later started blaring out the strains of the song "Tub-thumping" the song Spading had danced to. I hadn't heard it in years~

I love teaching....today I embark upon a journey of discovery with 8 other brave and creative travelers.

Today, my year long solo performance intensive  in Santa Fe begins! This class is my "baby". I have the opportunity to work with people for an entire year and witness and support their creative journey as it unfolds.

I'm beginning the class by asking each one to tell a story from their lives about a day or event that changed the course of their life forever. They do not know what I'm going to ask them and that is part of the joy and excitement of solo improvisation. I will ask each one to breathe deeply and connect with the core of being. Without "overthinking" or anaylyzing what they're going to say, I'll ask them to just "jump in" and tell me the story.

Their assignement for next week is going to be to create an 8-10 minute monologue (as themselves) sharing a story about the best sex they've ever had! No turning away in my group, from anything~ Rather we dive right into the core of our deep experiences and see who and what we uncover there.

Later in the course, they will become charaters based on people they know sharing their stories and characters based on people they interview, and crazy, even absurd characters based on their own imagination and the universes that live inside each person. They will deliver monologues as animals, grains of sand and their enemy. (That could be a person, addiction, or mother's voice or anything in between or beyond)

The long and the short is that they are embarking upon a discovery of stories, that live in them, that flow through them and that give insight on both the personal experience and the universal. They will explore the concept of "The Hero's Journey" both within themselves as they undertake this courageous and life changing process and in their charaters stories.

I am so excited to meet them today at the studio. As always, I anticipate quite a year!

And a year from now(Life and God willing), there will be eight more amazing and surprising one person shows, serving all of life through their perfromances in this world.

When I was a kid, my grandparents would buy a side of beef for the freezer every winter. If you didn't grow up in the country, you may not know that  means a half a cow.

T-bone steaks were piled up high as were delicious New York strips, roasts, filets and on and on. When I was in jr high I couldn't sleep most nights because my grandfather was dying. I would prowl around the house and end up in the basement pulling out another steak from the enormous freezer. I would fry it up in butter (still frozen) adding a bit of water to the pan so the steam would defrost it as it cooked. I would add some A-1 sauce to the side of the plate and eat every bite....delicious.

As an adult I always loved meat and became a goumet cook in the last several years. I learned how to make a perfect Bolognase sauce with prosiutto and beef ,as well as a mean brisket that would give any Jewish grandmother a run for her money.

But, something started feeling wrong to me a couple of years ago. It was when we adopted Rex (photo at left). We got Rex when he was a puppy. The first time I saw him it was love at first sight. He was so little and vulnerable and I really bonded to him in a way that I hadn't bonded to an animal before. And as I learned from the experience of bonding with my daughter; when we really let ourselves feel our deepest connection with another, a whole world of compassion and empathy opens up.

I had continued to eat meat all these years although I made the shifts to "all natural", "grass fed" and "free range" some years ago.

But somehow, in loving my dog so deeply, I began to realize that I could only continue to eat farm animals because I objectified them. I saw them as "other". I did not look into their eyes and see how full of life and soul they are. I did not conciously remind myself that most pigs are smarter than dogs. Some people in parts of Asia think it's o.k. to eat dogs too.

I went on a website on internal cleansing and read something profound. It said "if you really want to reach a space of unconditional love inside your heart, you cannot continue to eat meat. It went on to speak about the energy of fear in the animal's body.When we eat meat, even if it's "organic", that energy of fear is of course in the meat.

And I stopped eating meat that day. No pig, cow or chicken is going into my body. I cannot work to aleviate the suffering in humans and contine to aviod the suffering of animals.

And, I am choosing not to seperate categories of animals, some as lovable and deserving, and others deserving of cages,lonliness and cruelty in their time on earth.

I do admit that some days I crave burgers or bacon. I still allow myself to eat wild salmon once a week for the time being. I will phase it out as I am able to handle it.

My heart and mind feel at peace with the decision. And, I feel that I can surrender more deeply into that energy of unconditional love without the suffering of another creature coursing through my veins on a daily basis.

With gratitude to my two bulldogs,Rex and Libby who teach me more about unconditional love each day~ They embody it!

Peace,

Tanya

  An astrologer said this would be the year my soul would come into full expression of itself and I can feel the energy coming on full and strong. I feel that I am standing in a moment I have been waiting for, for lifetimes. Certainly for all of this lifetime.

43 and a half years ago, I was born into a conservative family who would work both knowingly and unknowingly to supress my voice. My mother became pregnant with me the month before John F Kennedy was assasinated. Family legend has it that I didn't speak to anyone ourside the family until I was about 9. I was painfully shy, a sensitive Cancerian born to a mother who could not see herself clearly. And, certainly could not see or understand her only child.

Childhood memories of picking up my uncle from the airport. He had been a soldier in Vietnam. He stank of a deep filfth coming out of his pores born of trauma and sweaty days and nights on the frontlines . His smell and the way he didn't come out of his upstairs room for weeks scared me. It also taught me to have a cellular aversion to war.

Father figures with sweaty palms and abandonments of their own who could not relate to the sweeteness and need of a lonely girl. Coming and going in and out  of a mother's bed.

Grandparents who both opened and closed my world. Traveling into the mountains of Lebanon as a child. Looking for fossils and pieces of ancient glass. Lunch at a Swiss hotel in the mountains of Aihn Zhalta. A few hours drive up the twisty mountains from Beirut. Seeing children my age trying to sell boxes of Chicklets to feel their families in Syria. Children dirty and looking for bread in garbage cans.

Maryland Suburban child has eyes wide opened. I am eight and they are eight.

I live with my grandparents in a villa whose terrace opens out onto the Mediterranean Sea. I float on my back in the very salty water that holds me up. I am One with All, for the first time. I know something but have no words for it.

The beggar children are living, trying only to find a way to eat, to survive. I ask my grandfather if we can buy the gum from them. He says no. "More will come if we do"............ I do not understand.

Years later, I am in India on a spiritual quest. I am there to see Papaji in Lucknow. A woman pushes her toddler toward me to beg. I am so angry with her. That she is using her infant to beg for her. I do not know what to do. I am overwhelmed by the poverty and do not know how to respond .

Again, I am taken into the comfort of the priviledged Amercian/ European world. We are the ones who have come to sit at the feet of the Master on the cool marble floors while the native bicycle rickshaw pedlers toil way in the scorching Indian sun.

So many paradoxes. A spiritual journey acnowledges the Oneness of All Beings. My heart has always known this Silence without ever being taught.

But now, looking back on years and years of all illusion being stripped away from me.  "Rest in no form" The Divine has said to me. Be prostate in surrender, whatever comes and goes. And so much has happened in the physical realm. Looking death in they eye, divorce, metal illness in a loved one, suicide in a close friend, betrayal from a deepest love. Creating my soul's work. My own form. Money comes....Money goes... Marrying again........"True marriage is only my marriage to Truth".... A dangerous vow I made thirteen years ago. Dangerous because everything that did not serve truth was taken from me.....I was warned by Gangaji, a teacher, before I took my vow. I was careless...still did not believe that what I feared the most could touch me. I was wrong. I take the vow at age 31. "I am married to the Truth.........with no possibility of divorce" I have married the highest intention in myself. Several lifetimes of karma, I believe get enacted in 10 years.

What is essential remains. I have come full circle. Beauty surrounds me. I am settling into my body, my life for the first time. Trauma and Supression. Loss and grief never could touch who I AM. I also happen to have a moonbeam by my side, my daughter, whose presence is grace and who keeps me moving through the unbearable.

I have integrated the knowingness of ALL being in alignment. My ten year old daughter said to me the other day "You know, Mom. I've come to the conclusion that life isn't supposed to be perfect. I think we're just all here to grow as souls and move on"

Ahhhh....Breath...... Yes.........

A reminder to me that we are bigger than our suffering, bigger than Global Warming and unconcious politicians in all parts of the world, bigger than our greatest accomplishment, and bigger that our ugliest moment.

I am grateful that my daughter has embraced the wisdom in herself at such a tender age. T..

At 43 and a half, this is also my year to embrace without question the power, expression, safety, love, creation, abundance and exhuberence that has always lived inside me and has been waiting to be set free.

I am also here to create deeper intimacy with my partner in life, my husband. We have been finding each other all along. I believe in the possibility of all  the final veils coming down and receiving the full  Beloved's embrace.

May you too, accept your infinite invitation in this new year. Even in this very moment............However long it takes us to get here, the answer is always YES!

Blessings, Tanya