In Linda Aldrich’s poem, we watch an acting class practicing ensemble work. The process being enacted through Stanislavski’s teaching can pertain to any art and maybe life in general: to love art in ourselves, not ourselves in art, to eschew the star system. The process being enacted has as much to do with values and character as any technical skill. The poem also reminds me of Samuel Beckett saying, “Try, fail again, fail better.” The partner at our back could be a real partner in collaboration, or maybe the presence of the work itself as we open ourselves up to it. I love the way the starlings enter this poem, just for the description itself, but also as an image of the collective, a reminder that we make our work for something bigger than ourselves. Aldrich conveys the frustration and the hope involved in making, and the dedication it takes.
Linda Aldrich has published three collections of poetry, most recently, Ballast (2021). She served as Portland’s Poet Laureate from 2018–21, and co-hosts with Marcia F. Brown the monthly Local Buzz Reading Series at The Yarmouth History Center.
—Betsy Sholl, Maine Arts Journal Poetry Editor
Ensemble Class as Governing Principle, 1972
Today we work in pairs, our backs turned
to each other so we can’t see. We have to sense
such unspoken communication with our partner
that on a given count, we’ll both make the same
single gesture with imaginary top hats: held out
with both hands as if asking for quarters, placed
over the heart in a gesture of respect, or swung up
and across the body in a grand vaudevillian bow.
We come to this studio without mirrors to learn how
to love Art in yourself, not yourself in Art,
as Stanislavski had written. Collective creative
power is the way to Truth, on and off stage.
I do not accept the star system, Stanislavski said,
but we wonder if the starlings of his native Russia
were his inspiration: their murmurations moving
across the sky like one graceful organism,
thousands of birds taking flight at once,
each focused on seven neighbors, shaping
and re-shaping into perfectly spaced, swooping
globes of wings without a leader.
No small parts, only small actors, he said.
We, too, would fly only as high as all of us
could fly together, how swirls of starlings
circle back to gather up those left behind.
All morning we work, all morning we fail,
take a break, switch out the pairs,
fail again. It isn’t possible, we think,
perhaps murmuration is only for the birds?
Nature’s laws are binding . . . woe to those who break
them, he wrote. We will come back tomorrow,
try again. One day we’ll have each other’s backs.
One day we’ll all bow at once.
Susan Cardwell on the left and Linda Aldrich on the right. “I remembered these old photos from a short play I wrote entitled ‘Arts on the Edge,’ and performed at the Source Theater in Denver. Both characters are named ‘Art.’ It was performed on a long plank three feet in the air.”