Find Your Teachers

First, the lesson from Dietz. Then, below, thoughts on it.

FIND YOUR TEACHERS
When you go into the world, you will sometimes, when you are lucky, find someone who you recognize, who HAS something you want.

Don't let that person get by you. Yell "STOP." Buy that person a beer. Find out what they know.

Finding teachers grows out of the RECOGNITION OF ABSENCE IN YOURSELF.
Look for the people of whom you say
"You confuse me"
"You demand more of me"
"You have something I don't"
And keep them close. Take from them what you can.

The corrolary to this, which Steven didn't add but which is how I see him live his life, is -- BE a teacher. When someone sees something in you they need, when someone wants to buy YOU a beer, say yes -- as SUZAN says, "if you want to learn something, teach it."

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A Note on the class where Steven said this.

Amazing how Herr Dietz manages to articulate ideas and PUSH us. This class I'm TAing for him, Collaboration, may just turn out to be the best class I've been part of. The idea of the class is to bring together writers, directors, actors, designers and push us, collectively, toward collaboration and a...what...distillation of craft? There are 20 of us in the class -- and we're hanging on the man's every word.

It may be, in part, that the class is hitting many of us at the right time. The QUESTION of the class, "how do you collaborate, and what do you bring to a collaboration" is one MANY of us wrestle with in our daily practice. I look around the theater (we meet in a theater) and see the people who have been my primary collaborators over the past couple of years -- people I work with repeatedly, want to keep working with, would step in front of a truck for -- Marie Brown, Mark Scheibmeir, Sydney Andrews, Harrison Butler, Halena Kays. Not to mention fellow playwrights -- Erin Phillips, Martin Zimmerman, Meghan Kennedy, Steve Moulds.

The class, for me, is all the more poignant because it's the last time I'll probably be in the same room with all these people, at least all at the same time. With only a few months to graduation, my instinct is to grab onto these people with both hands, and take them into the world with me. The end is fast approaching...and the idea of walking away from some of these people sounds antithetical to what I'm trying to do (BUILD community, CULTIVATE collaborators). Still, I'll take what I can get while I can get it.