For the past month or two I have been reading
The Craftsman by Richard Sennett. It's a beautifully written, rich and dense book that has given me a lot to chew on. It has also challenged my patience, since I'm trying to record Sennett's ideas and key points of his examples in my notes for later use, and there's just so. Much. There. I don't want to miss anything, but gosh I'd like to wrap this up and move along too. This is so a propos to today's reading topic.
Part of
The Craftsman's beauty is that its topics, while specific and targeted in some ways, also have big meanings that I can apply to whatever is going on in my work and life at the moment. For example...
Today I've been reading his section on
resistance and
ambiguity. Sennett writes that the craftsman needs three skills to dwell productively in frustration:
Skill #1:
Reformat the resistance to allow for a leap in imagination. If a problem is too strictly defined, it can be impossible to get past the resistance. New meanings can be found in translation to a different format. For example, when trying to build a tunnel in the mud under the Thames in London in 1869, engineer Peter Barlow imagined the shape of his body when swimming across the river--more like a tube than a box, the shaped used in tunnel-building efforts to date.
Skill #2:
Patience, or the capacity to stay with frustrating work with sustained concentration. If something takes longer than expected, re-orient expectations and temporarily suspend the desire for closure.
Skill #3.
Identify with the resistance, turning outward and tapping into the power of sympathy. Take on the most forgiving element of the resistance, rather than trying to attack the whole thing at once.
Because it's always more pleasant to look critically at other people's work than my own, I'll apply these skills to my 14-year-old son Liam, as he prepares for the Youth America Grand Prix ballet competition. He is already working hard at Skill #2--he has been practicing and preparing in a sustained manner for months, with the help of two very skilled and demanding coaches.
Liam's classical variations contain technically challenging steps, which he has approached in a traditional way--working them over and over again, sometimes to a level of extreme frustration. Working with Skill #1, he will have to meet the challenge of reformatting these maneuvers inside his own mind, without the help of his coaches, by breaking down the steps and reconstructing them in a way that makes sense to him--a different kind of sense that taps into his imagination, beyond the mechanics of how the steps work.
Skill #3 is a tough one--What does his body want from him? What does the choreography want? How can he reconcile the two? Can he step out of his body and hold a kind of dialogue with it?
These musings are probably only useful to me; Liam is not always that interested in his mom's enthusiastic attempts to apply my book learning to the work he's doing. Maybe next I'll try applying these concepts to my own work.
PS Want to see a bit of
Liam's rehearsal? I'm very proud of him.
