You’re reading The Hundred Day Reckoning, in which an award-winning playwright (me) mines ancient dramatic principles and a range of current wisdom to expand creativity, capacity, and freedom in the face of Life Drama (a.k.a. yours).
This Substack evolved from my program The Hundred Day Reckoning, a Creative Response to Hard Change, now open for fall enrollment!
Day 1: Sept 7th, Day 100: Dec 15th. Live on zoom with me.
Very limited capacity, has sold out every time. Explore and join here.
Last week I received a gift of time and silence through Stillwright, a retreat for playwrights founded by Erik Ehn and currently organized by Liz Duffy Adams and Gary Winter. No phones, no internet, just stillness (and one hella dramatic storm) at the Salo Farm Arts Retreat near the Adirondacks. Jan-Peter Pedross was our gracious host and Helen McIntosh our bliss-inducing chef (Helen made four epic lasagnes to accommodate the dietary everything of eleven people).
We entered silence after dinner Saturday night via a brief ritual led by Liz Duffy Adams and Anne Washburn, and broke it Friday afternoon (actually we broke silence Thursday when the power went out but then returned to stillness!).
We rotated leading warmups before each work session in a rustic 1970s dance studio, 9am and 2pm daily.
I loved these warmups and share them here to inspire you.
Some include drawing, some include writing, some both. Don’t be afraid to draw badly! I include my own drawing to prove this point. The worse you draw, the better it wakes up beginner’s mind (or so I tell myself). Brief physical movement beforehand is helpful! On retreat, these included everything from dancing to your favorite silent song, to volleyball warmups, to red-light-green-light. I won’t replicate those here, but do move around if you can.
Each of these is meant to take about ten minutes total, as a precursor to other writing. But if you’ve got just ten minutes, try one anyway!
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