"The Shakespeare Requirement" (2018) and "The English Experience: A Novel" (2023), by Julie Schumacher

Julie Schumacher has grown as a narrator; she reads both books and excels in the second one, especially when inhabiting the voices of jaded female students. Her forte is not the plot but shifting spontaneously among perspectives from disparate points of self-absorption. Schumacher understands that time is the ultimate scarce resource, and that self-expression is the ultimate urge. Her protagonist, Jason Fitger, pays with the precision of his prose for the reader's scarce attention to Fitger's self. Fitger succeeds. So do some of his students in The English Experience; they make up with sincerity for what they lack in fluency. Janet fails.

Writing is trading in time and over time, with others and with one's future selves. The writer sinks time so that others do not have to. The writer thinks so that others can think better.

Deseo

(12 November 2023, Un Teatro)

A modern ballet tells ten different stories in parallel. One experiences them develop all at once, just as one hears chord progressions in a musical piece. Interpret a dance performance too soon, before the experience of watching it has coalesced, and you have destroyed nine stories out of ten by singling out just one. Do so publicly, and you have robbed other spectators of their stories. It is best not to interpret. If one could interpret, then the medium of dance would be redundant.

What may be more profitable is to describe how watching a ballet has changed one. And even if one is unchanged, one’s sensibilities may be selectively awoken, if only for a moment. That, too, may be worthy of description. Perhaps the latter phenomenon is exactly what the incantation “you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep” in the motion picture Asteroid City meant. To be consumed by theatre or dance is to succumb to sleep. To wake up is to walk out of the theatre with one's sensibilities sharpened. 

In a typical novel or a film, the protagonist follows a positive character arc. First, he is desperate to satisfy his wants. Then, in the course of the story, he learns that his wants are at odds with his needs. He changes course. He grows. This perspective on storytelling suggests supremacy of needs over wants and a conflict between the two.

In Deseo, needs and wants are in harmony; the characters follow flat arcs. It is the audience whom the dancers invite to become heroes each complete with a conflict and a positive character arc. To this end, Act 1 prompts the audience not just to think of wants but to actually want. Act 2 parts the curtains slightly and invites the audience to walk through for a glimpse of the ultimate needs: connection and beauty.

Jessica Sandoval, Deseo's choreographer and director, along with Estefanía Villa and Tathanna, the dancer duo, define these needs with extraordinary precision. They do so in the language that few speak and fewer still speak fluently but everyone understands: the language of dance. What is even less common is that the artists know exactly what they want say. And they will not repeat the definitions; the production has a limited engagement. The audience members are uniquely responsible for learning the supplied definitions and for living out their assigned character arcs.

Drawing the audience in like this requires a powerful connection with the ballet's creators. Jessica Sandoval reveals the secret: “On stage, one must be free. Free means vulnerable. Vulnerable is open. Openness generates a connection.”

Deseo thus introduces connection at two levels. The dancers connect with the audience. The dancers also connect with each other. Beauty nourishes both connections.

To live is to want. To live intensely is to want passionately. To live is to live in the moment; there is nowhere else.

"Dear Committee Members" by Julie Schumacher (2015)

Life is a fight against the second law of thermodynamics. Life wins fight after fight, and yet, as it wins, it edges ever closer to losing the war. The second law is immutable.

The second law is immutable. As life creates order, elsewhere chaos intensifies. Life is a negative-sum game, in entropy terms. A certain degree of parochialism is required to root for life. 

Human flourishing is the pursuit of beauty and interestingness---a fight against ugliness and monotony. What is considered beautiful and interesting is inherently subjective, parochial, too.

Morality calls for just the right amount of parochialism.

Julie Schumacher's Dear Committee Members is a paean to beauty---the beauty of saying things. The tragedy of the piece---should one be inclined to read it as a tragedy rather than a triumph of the word over matter---is in the English professor's lopsided emphasis on beauty over interestingness.