As my description of my self-designed MBA internship faded into the walls, a pregnant pause filled the room. And as I looked at Professor Pitts-Wiley’s giant and gentle face, I saw a thoughtful grimace appear, and spread across the surface of his vast dome to include his prodigious ears, his salt-and-pepper mustache, and the whites of his heavy, purposeful eyes. And as that moment gave way the Professor leaned his massive torso onto a black-lacquered desk, set his large brown eyes on mine and posed, gravely: Are you on a journey? Or are you wandering?
A journey, he would go on to explain, has purpose, whereas wandering does not.
It’s been four months since my meeting in Professor Pitts-Wiley’s office in April, the same month that I decided that I was going to create my own summer internship as a storyteller. And in that time I feel that I’ve learned a lot about my purpose. From coffee chats with designers to interviews with retirees in New Mexico, I’ve found that my passion lies in what I call “performance ethnography.” I define performance ethnography as the act of extracting stories from my environment, through interviews and observation, and sharing them with others in a compelling way, through film and public speaking.
And yet I have my moments of self-doubt. As I face the coming year I’m struggling with basic questions: do I practice performance by continuing my stand-up comedy or by being the spokesmen for a social movement? Do I practice ethnography through self-funded interviews or within the context of a private company? And even more pressing, as I read an invite for a welcome-back party on campus, how does my MBA education serve my passion?
As I struggle with these questions at the tail end of my summer internship, I think to advice that my sister once gave me: make your decisions from a place of confidence, not fear. And as I visualize my career in performance ethnography in front of me, one thing that is clear is that the most purposeful path leads through a period of practice, of creating content, and of immersing myself in its form.
And so in the following year I will take a leave of absence from MIT Sloan and delve into my craft. And as I find a part time job to finance my creative ambitions and create a community of similarly inspired folks, I feel nervous, but also confident. Confident that I’m one step closer to the moment when I can lean in over that black-lacquer desk, look Professor Pitts-Wiley squarely in the eyes, and reply with all of the conviction in the world: I’m on a journey.
How much can a blind woman teach you about filmmaking? Turns out, quite a bit.
As I reflect on my Buffalo Walk piece, and prepare to dive into the rest of my footage from my cross-country drive, I’m grappling with how to create a short documentary that’s both hopeful and gripping. How do I tell a story that’s positive, yet doesn’t fall into the trap of being naïve?
At yesterday’s National Storytelling Conference in LA I had the pleasure of attending Wendy Edey‘s excellent talk on hopeful storytelling. Wendy, a blind “Hope Specialist” from Alberta Canada, counsels those who struggle to find hope in their lives, be it because of an illness, addiction, or another circumstance that’s weighing on their lives.
Wendy shared the following insights on how to tell a hopeful story:
- Organize your story around a symbol of hope, be it an object or a person.
- Don’t tell people what to hope for; empathize with what’s possible for them and what they’re ready to hope for.
- Create hope with the language of yet and when, e.g. He had not yet discovered that people with disabilities can win battles / I look forward to the day when the day after chemo will be as good as the day after taking an asprin.
- Create hope by playing with time; make the time span as long as it needs to be.
- A hopeful story is a lot more about how bad it gets in the middle than how well it resolves in the end.
- Make the hope obvious: literally call it out to the audience.
- The element of doubt makes hope significant.
With Wendy’s advice ringing on my ears, I’m curious to see how I will be able to weave her guidance into a film narrative. Thank you for your thoughts Wendy, and here’s to weaving positivity.
Last Tuesday my workshop mates and I each took the stage at the Improv Hollywood and delivered a five minute stand-up routine. As we worked through our sets, I marveled at the fact that in an era of smartphones and instant gratification, 150 people willingly unplugged from the world and for one hour focused all of their attention on one stage, one microphone, and one voice. Storytelling lives, I thought. Or is stand-up comedy really a form of storytelling?
Fresh off of a four-week stand-up comedy course, my answer to this question is yes, it is. However there are subtle differences between the two: Traditional storytelling tends to be longer form; stand-up tends to be shorter. Traditional storytelling tends to focus on one journey; stand-up is often about several disjointed experiences.
That said, the similarities far outweigh the differences. Both forms of expression are delivered without technology: just a stage and a mic. Both can be formulaic in their structure (traditional storytelling: beginning – middle – end; stand up: premise – opinion – act out). Both are inherently funny – and more gripping – when the performer is vulnerable with their audience.
I’ve always defined storytelling very broadly — from a tale told around a campfire to an epic projected onto a theater screen. That said, my stand-up experience was a neat reminder that storytelling, in its purest most basic form, can still cut through the most modern distractions and capture the imagination of a room full of people.
I have yet to meet a person who has thought more deeply about how story is constructed than Barbara Barry.
A former PhD student at the MIT Media Lab, Barbara’s research focused on developing systems that can understand story and assist in its creation. Building such a system, it turns out, is really really hard. Take the sentence, “She ran down the street with a wet cat in her arms.” When a person hears this they know, intuitively, that a dramatic event is unfolding. They imagine the scared, cold cat digging its claws deeply into the woman’s hand. They imagine the women, running from or towards something with a sense of urgency. A machine, on the other hand, will have great difficulty extrapolating such storylines. Barbara has done extensive work on tackling this problem by creating storytelling platforms that draw on paradigms in artificial intelligence, psychology and the archetypes of story.
Potential applications of Barbara’s research includes:
- A decision engine built into a videocamera that asks you what scene you wish to film (say a birthday party), and then suggests a potential shotlist (birthday cake, candles, presents, balloons, etc). This system could also analyze your previous shots and suggest what shots to take to make the story more compelling.
- A custom documentary builder that allows you to pick an event (say Election Night 2008), a subject (say the 2nd generation Cuban diaspora), and then automatically outputs a powerful, compelling video on the story of (in this example) the Cuban disapora during the Obama/McCain election.
- A healthcare platform that develops a customized narrative that can soothe a patient who is in pain or feeling anxious. This is based on the premise that A: not everyone relates the same way to the same stories (e.g. to imagine floating in the sky would be scary to someone with a fear of heights); and B: story and narrative can have a real impact on managing physical stresses.
Barbara also pointed me towards some super helpful resources:
- On the archetypes of story: Georges Polti, 19th Century French writer who described 36 basic types of story; Aristotle’s Poetrics: earliest-surviving work of dramatic theory
- On understanding compelling story structure: Robert McKee, screenwriting instructor whose former students have won 26 Academy Awards and 125 Emmys.
- On the concept of conceptual dependency: Roger Schank, who developed a markup language based on the principle that verbs of all languages can be expressed using a small number of primitives.
- On Story at MIT: The Common Sense Computing Initiative is studying how to use story and narrative as a tool for problem-solving.
I’ve heard from several folks about the power of storytelling, but my meeting with Barbara left me in awe of both the complexity of story and its influence on fields ranging from healthcare to problem-solving.
On June 2nd I walked the streets of Buffalo New York armed with a camera and a question: what are the values that will make people want to pack up their bags and move to Buffalo New York today?
As I knocked on doors and interviewed strangers across the city, I found a complex story about crime, nepotism, charity, a strong sense of community, and entrepreneurs who are breathing new life into the economy.
For a glimpse into Buffalo, and perhaps by extension the many cities in America’s “rust belt” that are finding their footing in a new global economy, I offer “Buffalo Walk.”
On storytelling via open mic, I’ve started a standup comedy workshop with the esteemed Leslie Wolff, and have audited a class by Judy Carter, a standup comedian who, ironically, is focused on bringing comedy into the business world. Lesley and Judy have very different approaches to standup: whereas Lesley encourages her students to talk about themselves and do so via story, Judy says, “nobody cares about you” and encourages her students to keep their material about their audience, and structured in a way that is more focused on a punchline. Either way, the more I workshop standup with my classmates, and attend comedy nights around LA, the more I realize that standup is special in that it’s one of the few areas of successful, popular entertainment that is not technology-driven. Standup is still (mostly) one girl or guy with a mic, a stage, and an audience.
On storytelling via improv, I performed at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater with my colleagues from my 101 class at UCB. Given that everything we performed was made up on the spot, it was amazing to see how everyone’s nerves melted away while we found our groove as a group. On my own performance, while one of my skits landed well, some others did not and I feel that I’m still being too cerebral when it comes to how I enter a scene. I need to really let go a la “jump and the net will find you.” Some of my friends from the class and I rented a theater in Culver City this afternoon and hopefully will be practicing as a group for the rest of the summer.
On storytelling via film, I’ve spent the last two weeks learning the ins and outs of Final Cut Pro, Apple’s professional editing suite. It’s incredibly powerful (and built sort of like Microsoft Excel but for video) and I’m excited about the control that it offers above and beyond the Apple iMovie editing suite (which I used for my first couple videos). I’m just putting the finishing touches on my first movie from the roadtrip, titled Buffalo Walk. It is a 9 minute piece that tries to answer the question: “what are the values that will make people across America want to pack up their bags and move to Buffalo NY today”?
Finally, this week I had a chance to drop in on the set of Matt Walsh’s new movie, the High Road. Besides getting some cool insight into the brains of director Matt Walsh and his actors (including Rob Riggle, of Daily Show fame), I also got to play an extra in a scene (I’ll be the guy at the Cadillac Jack’s diner counter during the chase scene). Off we go-
This week I took a deep dive into improv via a one-week course with the Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB). As we wind down, my instructor Nick handed out a worksheet that summarizes the rules of improv that he’s worked to instill into my 16 classmates and me. The last item reads: “Final Rule: You can break all of the preceding rules, however, most of the time you’ll be better off if you don’t. Improv rules tend to be life rules.”
Given what I’ve learned in this course, I suspect that the intended meaning of this last point is that good improv is realistic. For improv to be funny, it needs to have a grounding in reality. If it’s completely fantastical, and the characters and scenarios are simply crazy, the audience will stop caring.
That said, I also interpret this in another way: the more comfortable you are with life, the more receptive the audience will be to your improv. From the two shows I’ve viewed and through my experience with my classmates, I find that the performers who consistently get the most laughs are those who truly don’t care about how they’re perceived, who are okay with complete lack of control in a scene, and who are totally focused on the moment (as opposed to the audience, or other distractions). In short, the more comfortable they are with their place in the universe (and whatever it throws at them), the more readily the audience connects with their work.
My last day of class is tomorrow, followed by a show at the UCB theater on Saturday evening. Here we go-
If someone asked me to define my summer internship in one word, I’d say, “storytelling.” If I were given two words, I’d say, “performance ethnography.”
My goal for the summer is to get a lot better at understanding peoples’ personal stories (ethnography), and sharing their stories – as well as my own – with others in a compelling way (performance).
The first 20 days of my internship have been decidedly ethnographic. With the exception of a workshop I held for students at a community center in Springfield Missouri, my days have been spent listening, rather than talking. I felt that it was important for me to start in this order because my gut tells me that in order to tell a good story, I must first become a good listener. Over my cross-country drive, I’ve interviewed 32 people on camera, in eleven cities across America, in discussions that ranged from five minutes to two hours in length. From the electrical engineer who became a pastor in Tulsa Oklahoma, to the graphic designer who moved to Mumbai India to start a nonprofit, to the Polish refugee who built a large baking business in Chicago, most of my interviews were focused on people who took a big risk to follow a passion.
So now that I’ve arrived in Los Angeles, what’s next? Well, now it’s time for performance. In my mind performance is defined as taking an idea and sharing it with others in a compelling way. This can take many forms, from addressing strangers on a street corner to publishing a documentary. In the following two months, I plan to practice performance in three ways:
1. Open mics: Reciting stories at open mic venues throughout LA.
2. Improv: Creating stories on the fly and performing them in front of others.
3. Film: Telling story via short-form video.
To that end, next week I start my open mic training via Fresh Faces, a standup workshop instructed by the talented Leslie Wolff. I also start a one-week intensive improv course with the Upright Citizens Brigade. Finally, I plan to hit the editing room and produce a series of short, hopefully inspirational videos using the footage I gathered over the course of my journey thus far.
So there we have it: performance ethnography. Here we go-
The odometer has clicked to 3,000 miles, tall palm trees line the streets, and dusty deserts have made way to a cavalcade of motorists heading to the grand blue Pacific. This can only mean one thing: I’ve arrived in Los Angeles.
The last few days have brought with them opportunities to get new perspectives on passion. Among them:
- Father Jim, the assistant priest at El Santuario de Chimayó, a famous church that has been called “the most important Catholic pilgrimage center in the United States.” Father Jim spoke about discovering his passion as a child while playing priest with his older sisters in Colorado. (Sante Fa, New Mexico)
- David, former employee of Los Alamos National Labs who quit his job to follow his passion for organic farming, and in the process developed a new form of garlic powder. (Santa Fe, New Mexico)
- Pritham, a good friend who balanced working as a full time management consultant with studying for her MCATs. She just completed her first year in osteopathic medicine and discusses the road that led her there. (Phoenix, Arizona)
- Three contestants who were auditioning for their own talk show on Oprah’s forthcoming TV network. (Laguna Niguel, California)
As I reflect on my time on the road, I feel blessed to have encountered so many unique perspectives, and also been supported so heartily by the family, friends, and friends-of-friends who were kind enough to open their hearts (and often their homes) to help make my project possible.
A few quotes that have stayed with me:
- “If you are fearful, fear will find you” – Volunteer for Heidelberg Project on working in neighborhoods with high crime (Detroit)
- “There is no such thing as a safe job anymore – Entrepreneurial baker on choosing your passion for a career versus what you think will be lucrative and stable (Chicago)
- “The unique thing about poverty in Buffalo is that it is neither entirely urban or rural. It is wide swaths of urban neighborhoods that are vacant, except for a few remaining city dwellers” – Local journalist on the new age of urban poverty (Buffalo)
- “To fail is to succeed at the wrong thing” – Engineer turned Pastor on the definition of failure (Tulsa)
As I reflect on my stay in Missouri and Oklahoma, four memories come to mind:
- Learning about intentional communities, and the impact of a passionate life on parenting, via my conversations with Tom and Sabrina in St Louis, Missouri.
- Eating well, sleeping better, and receiving great care and love from my extended family in Springfield, Missouri.
- Taking a first stab at wrapping my thoughts on passion into a lecture, and delivering it to a group of ten 7-9th graders at a community center in Springfield. (three of them fell asleep — clearly I’ve got some work to do)
- Spending several hours with Pastor Calvin Battle and members of his congregation as we did a deep-dive into Calvin’s foray into being pastor (after a successful career as an engineer).
As I enter the last third of my trip, I see New Mexico, Arizona, and California before me and three stories that need telling. Here we go-
Sweet city of angels, thanks for the memories- (@ Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) ✈ w/ 22 others) http://4sq.com/qm5avabout 16 hours agofrom foursquare
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