Tag Archives: Clay David

Minimalist approach

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Sams_boxSam: √ high-top sneakers, √ black pants, √ blue shirt, √ trench coat, √ red nose, √ gas mask,       √ bowler hat, √ bow tie, √ wig, √ jacket, √ bottle glasses.

Valier: √ Rolling bag, √ umbrella, bowler hat, √ bell, √ ear muffs, √ oar, √ cane, √ plastic sheet gauze/wrap, √ suit, √ dress shirt, √ tie, √ pocket silks, √ make-up.

Production: √ 3 apple boxes, √ portable screen/stage, √ smoke machine, √ smoke machine fluid, √ projector, √ sound system,         √ power chords, √ lights, √ mirror ball, √ rope,     √ grip clips, √ programs.

Our intention for Samlandia is to keep things as simple, as minimal, as possible. We want our set to be portable, easy to assemble, and to be able to be packed in a car and able to be adjusted to the size of the venue, where ever we are performing. In preparing for this production, we are putting the emphasis on storytelling and engaging the audience’s imagination to fill in the blanks so that what the audience takes away is the feeling hanging in the air and in their hearts.

The traditional way of making an operatic set is to use painted backgrounds and facades to make the scenery of the opera grand as a means to support the story. People are always trying to find new ways of doing opera. And Samlandia is no exception. With the master design skills of Clay David and the projected multimedia images I (Sam Rubin) am shooting for the backgrounds, our set, though minimal, will be an intrinsic and dynamic, moving element to support the story.

Mozart made operas that included both singing and talking (like The Magic Flute). Samlandia also includes both singing and talking, as well. We’re striving to create a big experience with the least amount of extraneous matter. With respect to how the chaos of life impacts a person with autism, Samlandia seeks to minimize distractive elements as part of the overall experience.

Dream. Startle. Feel.

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Deconstruction Mind Map of Samlandia

Deconstruction Mind Map of Samlandia

The intentional logic of Samlandia is built on memories of moments, snapshots of time and place that form connections. The images, though random, and the stories they represent congeal at certain points into familiar archetypes. These archetypes are in our DNA and, therefore, recognizable, and anyone can relate to them.

For example, there is a scene in Samlandia where Sam takes a train. We see the modern world as it is with tunnels, highways, bridges…. But, long before this area became what it is today (what it looks like and how it functions), the area the train crosses was revered as a body-spirit. That spirit hasn’t gone anywhere. We just don’t see it because it’s not our frame for living now. That place is now placeless and lives in dream time.

As a Sensitive, Sam feels it and it throws him into a quandary. It tugs at him and he can’t shake it. It possesses his spirit. He knows that place. And, yet, it’s not there. He feels it. But it is within the dream.

He is a conduit for that dream.

But dreams are unstable. The variables of them, how random thoughts string together, regardless of their content, reveals to us something about ourselves that we *know* and often don’t want to see: We are all fragile, unstable, confused. And when we encounter a neurological difference as pronounced as autism, we…well….

Tectonic plates silently move beneath our feet and we just never know when they’re going shake the stable foundation we’ve attempted to erect and startle us into rethinking our lives. And then there is the wind. Like fishes unaware of the water, we don’t see the air until it gets muddied up somehow. It builds slowly, but at some point, there is a tipping point, something big happens to make us aware that something’s gone terribly wrong with the very ether that supports life. But, it’s a current. And we’re dragged along.

And life is like that. We drift.

We hang desperately onto the drift. We try to nail it down. We call it trend, linear in nature.  We give it a label…anything to separate it from ourselves. We are not…that. Are we? And then, a story builds around it, makes its way into our present-day oral tradition, our media. Not so long ago, autism was 1:10,000. How is it that it morphed to affecting 1:83 now in just a mere 16 years?

The transmutation of any life from creation to decay is something we don’t much notice day to day. But, when life throws us a curve ball like this, we look for answers, we realize we are startled. Something has intruded on the dream. Everyone knows someone with autism.

So, I use still images which I dissolve together in video edits to create the feeling, because we are confused about what’s happening in the air-fishbowl. We recognize life. But something’s profoundly changed. Is this an aberration? The new normal? Or just a bad dream? It could be any place, any city, any train. It could be any child, any young man or young woman, anywhere.

fallacy (n.): a mistaken belief…

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…especially one based on unsound argument.

AUTISM is defined as a disorder of socialization, communication, and repetitive behaviors.

When a child is diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), the doctor recommends school.

If autism were understood to be a biological expression (a symptom, if you will) of an underlying illness, (for example, a systemic inflammatory process that impacts the brain), wouldn’t it be a more logical approach to work on the biological systems in the body that needed repair/healing before expecting the child to comply in a classroom?

~ from Samlandia, Scene 1…

It was Special Education pre-school. I was four. I was afraid of the sound of the bell. I knew it was going to go off at certain times. So, I held my ears in anticipation of it.

Instead of recognizing the intelligence of my action–that I was protecting my ears from the harsh sound and my anxiety about the bell, my teacher forced my hands off my ears and held them on my knees as the bell went off.

The teacher was not trying to be mean.

This is the prevailing paradigm for educating (conditioning) a child with autism about how to “behave” (comply) in school.

The idea is to make the child LOOK normal. But, does that really help him to BE normal?

About SAMLANDIA

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Samlandia: A Gondola Ride Through Love and Out of Autism is an operatic play co-written by Sam Rubin, Clay David, (with some dialogue polish by Sally Park Rubin). The performance explores the subject of educating someone with autism.

The audience follows a young man finding his bearings within the construct of the “neurotypical” world through the intense lens and experience of the world of heightened senses. A question that motivated Sam Rubin to engage in this project: Is an active, hands-on creative environment more conducive to learning for people on the Autism Spectrum?

An award-winning filmmaker, classical singer, actor, and author of And…Action! My TAKE on Autism (and Life), Sam Rubin has experienced Autism.

In Samlandia, he plays Sam. He co-wrote the libretto, is filming the multi-media graphics and recording the sound sequences for the show, as well as composing the music.

For a fuller bio of Sam, please click on the bio page (above).

Clay David, a nationally award-winning educator, keynote speaker, director, actor and musician, hails from the rural bayous of Louisiana. Clay is the Dean Goodman Best Director in the San Francisco Bay, Shellie Award winner for outstanding set and costume design, BRAVO Award for Educational Excellence and the Golden Apple Best Professor Award, and former host of Theatre Appreciation, a video and live stream educational series for disabled and international students. Having raised a special and disabled brother, Clay has acted, sung, designed and directed Off Broadway and regional theatre to the Special Olympics.

Clay has portrayed around the nation title roles of Amadeus, Jesus Christ Superstar, Hamlet, The Dresser, and The Elephant Man. And he has originated roles in new operas and musicals, Straight Laced: A Cantata, Little Women, Hit It!, Josephine the Pirate Queen, and Rivets, The Rosie the Riveter Musical.

Local the San Francisco Bay Area, he has directed and designed for The New Conservatory Theatre, Zeum Theatre, Yerba Buena Center, African American Shakespeare Company and the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, The Dean Lesher Regional Center for the Arts (Walnut Creek), and the SS Red Oak Victory Ship, Richmond Marina.

SAMLANDIA public performances will begin in late February/early March 2014 in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Making of Canary

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Dreamin' of Samlandia...

Sam Rubin reheasing “Little Bell” (Scene 1)

By Sam Ethan Rubin

My performance began thirteen years ago in a white room. Floor, ceiling, carpet, all white. It had two shelves, out of reach to me. My toys were up there. The only way I could access my toys was to somehow communicate what I wanted.

I knew what I wanted, but I had only a few words then. I was seven. Words got stuck inside my brain. I could not get them into my mouth. But, I could echo back what I heard. That is called echolalia.

Lauren, my helper, brought a refrigerator box into the playroom. It was big. Tall. It dominated the room. But it pleased me to have it there. She lifted me up and put me in it. It was dark inside. I sat down on the bottom of it and looked up. The white ceiling became a blue sky. I could see it. But, I could not point to it. Pointing was something I did not do.

She peeked over the edge and tickled the box from the outside. I stood and traced the sound of her fingers with my fingers from my side of the box. The game pleased me. She said, “Spiders.” I said, “Spiders.” From inside the box, I could feel them walking on the outside.

Lauren banged on the outside. I banged back from the inside. Together, we communicated by drumming on the walls of the box. We created a polysymphonic dissyncopated rhythm. I wanted more of that. That…that…connectedness. Like drawing silk from a worm, Lauren gently pulled.

She cut holes in the box. She looked in. I looked out.

This was the beginning.

Slowly, language came. “Hi! How are you?” “I’m fine. Thank you.” “Will you play with me?” “Yes, I will.”

I moved from the playroom to bigger spaces. The house. A stage.

Four years later, when cast me in A Christmas Carol, I stood in the center of that first stage, alone in the dark before the show on opening night, and pirouetted in a perfect circle, my Tiny Tim cane, an extension of my arm, pointing out, reaching to touch an audience of three hundred that would soon fill the theatre, remembering the playroom where it all began.