“Is my story worth telling?”
Many artists struggle with this question when creating personal work.
Yet we all have stories to tell. We’ve all led lives that in one-way-or-another connect with others (whether we know it or not). And often, it’s personal stories that most touch us as readers, listeners, and viewers.
As Robert Frost once said, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” In other words, if we’re not willing to get vulnerable with our art, our audience probably isn’t going to connect with it as strongly as we’d like them to.
Why We’re Afraid to Share Our Stories
We know that personal stories can be captivating. So many famous authors, painters, songwriters, and choreographers put themselves at the center of their work. But for some reason, when it comes to our own stories, we often feel they don’t deserve to be broadcasted.
This is partly because we tend to see these famous artists as “great.” Imagining their lives as being full of glamour and grandiosity, faced with unsurmountable adversity, tormented with existential crises, or as if they hold all the secrets to living a full life.
In short, they are deserving of greatness, we are not.
But, in reality, the great artists were as human as the rest of us. It’s humans that make art and the humanity in a work of art that often delivers the most impact and emotional resonance to its audience.
So why is it that when we’re telling our own stories through our work that we imagine our humanity to be unworthy of investigation and publication?
The Value in the Personal
Personal stories often carry themes audiences of all kinds can relate to.
Many great novels take a large part of their inspiration from the author’s own story. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath or On the Road by Jack Kerouac among some of the most notable.
Some of the most famous painters’ most highly regarded works are comprised of self-portraits. Take Frida Kahlo or Van Goh. Both have portfolios filled with iconic paintings of their own faces.
Countless musicians also create music specifically focused on pieces of their own identities, relationships, and personal stories. Leonard Cohen’s highly personal works have transcended generations and one need look no further than the popularization of hip hop to see how the personal can resonate with broad audiences.
Poetry is another form often focused on the stories and lives of its makers. Dorothy Parker, Maya Angelou, Dylan Thomas, Charles Bukowski…
Even going back to Shakespeare’s sonnets and moving forward to Terrance Hayes who himself said, “Maybe Art’s only purpose is to preserve the Self.” – from Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Even less purely autobiographical works are centered around situations, relationships, and places close to their creators. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing immediately comes to mind. Or, Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets which carried themes derived from personal experiences with gangster types and would go on to be a type of person his work continued to focus on.
I would argue that most artwork has some autobiographical component.
As Frederic Fellini once said, “All art is autobiographical.”
But if it isn’t the people making this work that are necessarily “great” or “exceptional”, what is it about their personal works that resonates so strongly with audiences?
After reviewing his evening length piece The Ballad of Lady M., I was invited to see an early draft of writer and choreographer Andrew Pearson’s current WIP (work in progress) Abbale and provide feedback on the working draft of the script. The work is extremely personal and vulnerable yet the entire (albeit small) audience at the reading agreed it was also engaging and riveting for viewers.
I’m in the very early stages of my first highly personal project (more on that later) and after seeing this early draft of Abbale, I knew Andrew would have some great advice for me. Luckily, for all of us, he agreed to let me share it with you as well.
How Andrew Found Worth in His Own Story
Abbale explores Andrew’s relationship with his father, his relationship to his decades older partner (Asaf), and Asaf’s relationship to his own father – who died many years ago in Israel, where Asaf grew up. Though still in the early stages, the piece is already powerfully moving and grippingly engaging.
I found out after the read-through, as we were providing feedback on what we’d seen, I had been sitting only two chairs away from Asaf the entire time. This brought the level of vulnerability in Abbale to a whole new level for me and I wondered to myself, “How did Andrew muster up the courage to do this?”
So, basically…I asked him.
“In recent years I’ve been thinking more and more about the idea that “the personal is political” and I’m seeing it everywhere now, from popular Netflix series to standup comedy specials. I think as the subject of Identity continues to get politicized, from gender to sexuality, to race, the more important specific stories are in how art-making becomes part of the global conversation and how artists comment on the state of the union.”
– Andrew Pearson of Bodies in Play
(All following quotes are from Andrew Pearson, occasionally with slight editing for context.)
But he didn’t start with this strong sense of worthiness, even at the beginning of his work on Abbale. The initial spark of inspiration for the project was more of a personal exploration. When he first started working on it, there was no intention of it ever being shared on the public stage.
“The seed was planted at a retirement party for my dad. I had this kind of “oh shit” moment in regard to what I want to be doing with my life. The seed laid dormant for a while, but when I started dating my partner [Asaf] and learned more about his father, the juxtaposition of the three relationships felt like a kind of “aha” moment.
“I knew I had to explore it for myself, and potentially share it with my dad, but I really wasn’t sure if anyone else would care. I did always feel as though my partner’s story was worth telling, but it was after sharing a very early version of the script with Lisa Bierman, my dramaturg/script consultant, that I started to believe it could be a thing.”
How Abbale Came to Be
One of the more confusing aspects of creating a personal work myself is how I’ll know what to include, what to exclude, and whether I’ll be able to crystalize a cohesive theme in my own experiences.
I was curious how Andrew was able to get Abbale to the point it had come to when I experienced it:
“The first version of the script attempted to explicitly include all of this research [about the cultural concept of a gay ‘daddy’, interviews with Asaf, and political histories of Israel], including quoting an article about how many of the US Presidents have daddy issues. It was fun to write and informative but very convoluted.
“When I read it to Lisa, she basically said “I’m more interested in your personal stories.” She encouraged me to try and tell more real-life stories about myself, my partner, and our fathers that might allude to some of the politics I was interested in exposing.
“After identifying the stories, she and I had a few consulting sessions where she basically pushed me to go deeper or find more detail.
“For the first read through I kind of just smashed together everything I had thus far to see what was sticking and where there were holes.” When he says, “first read through,” he’s referring to the read-through I attended.
Advice for Creating Personal Work that Resonates with Audiences
Andrew has a thorough research and iteration process in his work. It shows in the final products, and even in the rough drafts. I asked him to share a bit on his research process as well as how – when much of the research is personal to him and his relationship – he goes about delineating which pieces to use versus discard.
“I do a lot of reading on whatever subject I’m working with. I like to know what people are saying about the themes or concepts. Sometimes this research goes directly into the text, sometimes it inspires some of the visuals or movement explorations I go through.”
When going through research and pulling together personal stories, Andrew has four questions he asks himself that are useful for all of us to vet various aspects of our own work:
- How do I show versus tell?
- What is this saying?
- Why is this important?
- What is an example of this from our real life?
He also shared four key takeaways for all of us to keep in mind when working on an autobiographical work.
Give Yourself Permission to Indulge
“Give yourself permission to indulge, to be self-focused. As long as you maintain a critical eye, if you’re going for something personal, I think you really have to go all the way.”
Also, ‘the personal is political’ is something Andrew has been continuously reminding himself of. He says remembering this notion gives himself “permission to be self-focused in my work.” This has only solidified itself as true for Andrew after sharing the work with others.
Be Specific
“Details and specifics are important!
“This was a lesson given to me after my first evening-length solo show. It felt counterintuitive – like I was trying to keep enough generality around my early stories to be broadly relatable, but the more detail and more specific you can be with a personal story, the more life the story has, and life is relatable, even when it looks different than your own.”
Don’t paint a broad brush in hopes that it widens your audience. It’s specifics that audiences/readers/listeners relate to. It’s also what makes a story more real, more tangible, as objects, colors, smells, etc. hold certain symbolic meaning for us.
Drilling down to specifics in your work will allow the audience to personalize their experience of your work and find those relatable details that will make your work more memorable to them.
Ask for Help
No one is going to performances, picking up a novel, or turning on an album to see the artist, as Andrew puts it, “masturbating on stage.”
This is why Andrew puts such an emphasis on doing read-throughs for friends whose opinions he trusts. And even people like me who he doesn’t have a personal relationship with – people who won’t automatically encourage and support any work he’s doing.
“This was exactly what the reading was about for me. But prior to that I relied mostly on Lisa’s feedback. She’d ask me a lot of personal questions and I could see her eyes light up during certain stories. She’d say, ‘Yeah, more on that, I want to know about that.’”
In short, “Get an outside eye. Bring in experts that are better than you. There are plenty of artists from different fields just waiting for the right project to collaborate on.”
Andrew also said it’s important to ask for help when you’re feeling stuck and to trust the people you’re asking for help from. “Don’t get hung up on the roadblocks and don’t be afraid to throw things away. This can be hard with work that is personal. Everything feels important, which is why it’s important to have a team of outsiders.”
The Finished Work Belongs to the Audience
“Once on stage, the work is no longer mine. It’s always very interesting to hear what people get from a piece. Some people can be moved, angered, or inspired by things I either thought were kind of throw-away moments or by concepts I wasn’t even aware existed in the work.”
The big lesson here is to not dwell so much on how audiences will interpret the work because you cannot control others’ perceptions of your work. They may be in a certain place in their lives, come from a specific situation, or have their own frame of reference to your work that you could never have foreseen.
Don’t hang too tightly on how you think people will receive your work. Focus on your own process and allow the audience to experience the work for themselves.
Your Artful Effort
If you have a personal story you’ve been wanting to tell, but are struggling to see the validity in, I want to offer you permission to indulge.
Take pen to paper and write or sketch about your story and your associated feelings, ideas, and anything that comes up for you! As Andrew says, have the courage to indulge in own story.
If something is there, you can take Andrew’s other advice of homing in on the details and getting an outside perspective. But for now, just let it out, get it down on paper, and give yourself permission to indulge.
Recommended Reading
Andrew’s recommended reading I you’re engaging with highly personal work…
“Eat. Pray. Love. * sparked a lot of my introspective work. There was something endearing and accessible about her awareness of her flaws and privileges while still being able to speak to deep societal issues. Her other book, Big Magic*, goes into the importance of maintaining a creative practice, and that was huge for me in regard to giving permissions to create my work.”
What Andrew Pearson is Working on Now…
Andrew will be inviting additional in-process feedback on his next iteration come June. To get details about this opportunity to see an exclusive viewing of Abbale while it’s still in-process, sign up for his mailing list, here! You’ll also get updates on other projects such as his new work for Theatre Dybukk premiering August 2020.
Andrew is also organizing and currently accepting submissions for the Shut-In Dance Film Fest.
You can find the guidelines here.
He’s also the Los Angeles Program Coordinator of the LEAP Program. The LEAP Program provides an opportunity for professional dancers to earn their Bachelor’s Degree from Saint Mary’s College.
They award college credit for dance experience and provide a Liberal Arts curriculum with the working professional in mind.
