Sometimes I feel rusty and removed. An outsider. I tell myself it's okay. It's a new way of not knowing. It's an opportunity to try out new ways of working that I've been thinking about for awhile. I can test new theories. I can work with new people, something I feel more and more compelled to do.
I'm trying not to indulge in nostalgia. I hate nostalgia. I'm allowing it in the room and studying it as a material. Mostly, I'm looking at the theater, its mechanics. How it's made. How its individual components operate, what they create together and why. This is stupid and profound work. My gut tells me it's going in the right direction.
In looking at the theater I'm confronted with my own personal baggage about the theater. I'm looking at my failures and successes, at my losses and aspirations. What I hate about it and what I love. It ain't pretty. No fun. I trust I will move through it. I've left the theater before. The last time was to go to graduate school. So it was kind of lateral move, on the order of parking a car. I parked myself in grad school and I'm realizing in rehearsal that I parked a lot of other things as well. They're slamming me relentlessly. These rehearsals bring up feelings of mourning and loss. There's a need to justify. It's difficult to be in the room with this. The challenge is to let it move through me and not hang on to it. To not dramatize it or act out. I'm not always successful. I feel like I'm in it alone and I am.
This work is hard without a theater company. To be honest, this kind of work would be hard with a theater company. All the emotion and vulnerability. The messiness of it all. The difference is that we'd be invested in learning how to work and be together as a company and as an ensemble. It would have its own challenges and frustrations. It wouldn't mean getting along always and agreeing about everything. But it would mean that we'd consciously made a decision to be together, to be in the room with each other. The decision to work exclusively as an ensemble becomes an engine that feeds the work and the performance, the artists and the audience as well. When a company has that special something, that freaky mojo, you feel it, it spills out on the stage, it draws you in.
I remind myself of something Anne Bogart says which I posted here in 2007.
Look around you right now and see who is there. These particular people around you at present are the key. They are your collaborators for now. They will serve as mirror, engine, necessary resistance, and your inspiration. They are your material and your means. With them, you begin to generate work. Without them, you are nothing. In the process of working with these people in your present circumstance, you will meet other people, and the circle around you will expand, alter, and redefine itself again and again. The temptation to wait until the perfect situation and the right people are in place before you make your best effort is simply avoidance. Do not wait. Your dedication to the given circumstances, right now, will eventually bring you closer to others who share your own belief and commitment. If you do not commit fully to the people with you now, like-minded others will never show up. Learn to love, admire, respect, and appreciate the people with whom you work. These colleagues, partners, and coworkers provide the necessary keys to your own development and growth. An attitude of respect will prevent the specter of neediness from raising its ugly head. Neediness is never attractive and rarely productive. - Anne Bogart, And Then, You ActYeah. That. What she said.
It's time to let go. The lesson repeats itself. Manifests in new ways. I set out nine years ago with the advice to stop trying to give people something they didn't want. It's time to think about what I want. Time to move on. Time to move forward, to let go of the past, to trust the process and know that my investment here is making the next step possible whatever and wherever it may be. It's enough.
