Flight Risk

Term 2 ended on April 4 with a week of work-in-progress performances of 20 minutes each, followed by a 10 minute lecture about the work and our process, followed by a term paper explaining our process and our work in more depth. I thought some of you might enjoy seeing the video of my performance, and the paper I wrote about it. This feels vulnerable, but I guess that’s just being an artist.

Enjoy!

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Flight Risk (closed captions available)

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My piece was first called “A Ritual for Bullshit,” then, “A Ritual for Right Now.” The name “Flight Risk” was rejected by the group, but I secretly like the name so that’s what I’ll call it. Flight Risk arose out of the intersection of my evolving artistic identity, my hunches about theatre that brought me here and keep me here, and the unique chemistry of six artistic spirits at this time, in this place. Creating this work involved, first and foremost, unknotting a lot of shame, which was both painful and surprising. Through, after, and in spite of that inner work, the purpose of this piece was to test some of my hypotheses about physical/devised/collaborative theatre. I believe that this kind of work can be transformative both for performers and audiences, by which I mean that when we walk out, whether of a completed process or of a performance, we notice that we are in some way different than when we walked in; and I believe that this work can create a sense of community and connection, among performers, between artists and audience, and between audience members. The process of creating this work was a part of my research too, as each time we met we tried different exercises in response to different questions or impulses, as I intentionally stretched myself beyond my tried-and-true processes and tried things I’ve learned in the last two terms, and as I sought new ways to engage my collaborators in a process that I was leading. In the end, I think I’m proud of the piece, because I think it achieved what I had hoped it would: it allowed me to play, with people I like, both as artists and as humans, and it reminded me, my collaborators, and hopefully everyone in the room that this work is fun, and that together we are joyful, powerful—even magical.

Being asked to share something that I want to explore, myself, as an artist, sent me into a panic, then into a spiral of shame. I spent 20 years knowing exactly what I wanted, doing everything I could to achieve it, and succeeding (though sustainability remained elusive). I’ve lost count of the number of times the word “passionate” was used to describe me. That I can recognize, in retrospect, that my company’s way of working was beginning to become restrictive and maybe a little monotonous does not matter; my company died, and with it the sense of identity and purpose that had animated my entire self-aware life. When that happened, and while a bunch of other things were happening in the world, I lost my identity and purpose and replaced both with a pressing moral mandate to be a good daughter, colleague, friend, neighbor, and citizen.

I don’t really know what I want to say, or do, or explore. I don’t pay enough attention to my own curiosity to be able to catch it out of the air and get a good look at it, let alone to plant it in the rich earth of attention it needs to take root and grow. I am in this program in part because, at this point in my artistic evolution, I know so much more about what I don’t want than what I do, and I need this time and space at arthaus—including the mortifying challenge of this assignment—to find my own artistic seeds again. I know that I loved and love what my company did; I know that I don’t want to resurrect its shaggy corpse. I know that I want to work collaboratively; I don’t know what I want to collaborate about. I know that I am a director of devised work; I don’t, anymore, know what that means or what that looks like. I know that I want to be a good neighbor, community member, and citizen of the world; I don’t know how to do that while also being the kind of advocate for myself, my wellbeing, my voice, and my vision that one needs to be to have any serious hope of making art. 

So I spent a couple of weeks in a corner of the studio or in a cafe or at my desk or on the Ubahn or on the streets of Pankow, Prenzlauer Berg, and Mitte, staring into the howling void where my passion used to be and crying. Writing and crying. Meditating and crying. Taking long walks and crying. Riding my bike and recording my own monologue of misery, just in case there was some art hiding in it, and crying. It was a lot of work.

Alongside all that, I noticed that so many grey mornings this winter, my classmates and I were coming into the dressing room heavy-hearted from some newsworthy horror or other, then walking through the door to the studio seeking neutrality and poetry in our hurting bodies. I had a hunch we could create work not around that heaviness, but from and through it, and I knew I wanted a chance to move through those feelings in community. So I invited whoever was interested to join me in trying. 

This “working from bullshit” group met twice. I framed this as working from and through, rather than around, the bullshit we all carry—letting it act as compost to nurture embodied creation. I facilitated but did not participate. I had intended to but found that I couldn’t do so while also feeling out when the group was ready to move from one phase of an exercise to the next. I lead exercises that invited participants to move with or be moved by the physical sensation of their feelings, and then led them through a process of transforming those physical feelings into gestures, in one case, and into objects, in another. 

After creating their gestures, I asked participants to partner up and teach them to one another. Everyone then performed the gesture they’d learned for the group, and we all shared what we saw (e.g. weaving, fireworks). Putting the things we saw together, we found rich material from which we could have begun creating work (but we ran out of time). 

The work of transforming our feelings into objects made its way into our final piece—we began by being moved by the feelings, then let them move us so forcefully that we expelled them from our bodies, where they became objects we could manipulate. We then traded objects with another person, who didn’t carry any of the emotional weight attached to the objects, and shared what we had received with one another, again inviting the group to share what we saw. In both cases, the artists reported having a different—lighter, freer—relationship to their feelings when they left than when they walked in.

These two experiences were instructive in a number of ways. First, they affirmed that, though it’s been awhile, I like facilitating and feel I’m good at it. I enjoy guiding artists through a process that that gives them the freedom and the framework to surprise themselves with what comes out of their bodies, and there’s not a lot I find more thrilling than watching their discoveries. As I often have in the past, I felt some regret and envy that I wasn’t able to join in—more strongly now, since I am accustomed to moving through these kinds of exercises myself, and since I had convened this experiment in part from my own sense of need. I was disappointed that the exercises led to physical expressions that I, as the viewer, experienced as closed, rather small, and rather low energy. I adapted my facilitation to generate larger, more physically interesting expressions, and to invite connection between the participants, and those adjustments worked. This could be really valuable work in a community that is experiencing shared grief, anger, or fear, and needs a way to collectively process those feelings before it can move into a generative space. I imagine that this work could be done effectively with any reasonably open-minded group, not just physical theatre artists—perhaps even more effectively with folks who would experience this kind of embodied expression as novel. However, without preexisting shared pain, it felt disingenuous to the point of manipulative to ask artists to come into a process carrying bad feelings just so that I could offer them transformation and a path towards collective creation. I think there’s value in working from rather than around our “bad feelings,” for lack of a better word, but when to use this way of working, and with whom, needs care and refinement to be generous and generative rather than exploitative.

Around the same time that I concluded that it would be immoral to keep asking my friends to spend their free time feeling bad to fuel my artistic growth, I also began my rapid, stomach-flipping free-fall into shame. I clumsily asked my classmates who’d been participating in these experiments to shift gears and be in my nebulous 20-minute presentation. The next time we met, I did something really hard that I’m proud of: I told them I was feeling disconnected from my work and from other artists and that I wanted to spend our time together doing exercises that promoted a sense of connection. This was incredibly scary, because I had no real idea how or whether this would turn into anything presentable, but I knew I needed it. We did exercises that we’d done in class before: leading one another on a string attached to different body parts; leading one another with the voice while our partner had their eyes closed. I had not planned to do this, but I remembered when we had done this in class that I really enjoyed the soundscape of everyone making their little noises—it had sounded to me like a jungle—and I enjoyed it this time, too. To borrow a phrase from Mike Shepherd, I followed my hunch, and I asked the group if we could find a way to all move with our eyes closed together, so we could create a soundscape with all our voices. We put blankets down on the floor, well away from the walls, and tried it. We liked how it sounded and how it felt when we encountered one another in the space, so we tried it again, this time setting ourselves the task of reaching all four corners of the blanket-square before finding our way back to our home corner. We also recorded this experiment to see if it looked at all interesting, or just felt like it. Based on what we saw in the footage, we expanded the square, added the rules of moving at different physical levels and being led by our hands, and tried playing more with the sounds we were making. We liked this and agreed to play with it some more.

From there, we tried Lacoq’s platform exercise, but broke the eye contact—we played with both the hero not looking at the chorus and the chorus not looking at the hero. Reviewing the footage later I saw powerful staging potential in these dynamics, but we all agreed both of these experiments felt bad, and they were left to the side in favor of the work that felt fun and connected.

Based on another idea I’d been rolling around in my head, we ended with the childhood game, “Button, Button, Who’s Got the Button?” We didn’t have enough people to play, nor did I remember the song we used to sing when we played it, so we improvised, staring at the camera while singing “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider” and passing a button behind our backs. It was as creepy as it sounds, and I hope we find some use for it someday. Because it was so strange, it generated a lot of riffing and laughter—the kind of riffing that is really at the heart of collaborative creation, in my opinion, because we’re unafraid to try out or blurt out our ridiculous ideas just to for the fun of it, and each absurdity incites a higher one until we land on gold, which we usually only realize when someone in the group suddenly stops laughing to say, “Wait—actually . . .” (We discovered the Groucho glasses in just such a moment.) By the end of that rehearsal we felt, to me at least, like a playful group of collaborators—a feeling I’ve been aching for since my company died, have been chasing this whole school year, and have scarcely found.

After that, I had one brief sad detour into trying to force a nonsensically childish narrative onto the random pieces we had played with, fell back down a hole of shame, and was restored to courage by a long, patient, and fortifying conversation with Lelia and Claire, who shone light on the things I really am curious about and really do want to explore: how to engage our audience in the awareness that we, artists and audience, are all here together, co-creating a unique experience; how to blur the lines between creating and experiencing, giving and receiving theatre; how to meet and honor our audiences where they are, while providing an opportunity for all of us in the room to journey to somewhere new and unexpected; how to play, because play is fun and because play is where every good thing begins. 

I began playing with structure, decided that we’d do that hackneyed old audience participation thing and, from there, our rehearsals very quickly turned into play. We would run through the exercises, quickly share what worked and what didn’t, all of us offering suggestions and asking questions, and we’d try again, refine again, try again. Our work became truly collaborative—my colleagues offered suggestions, asked clarifying and refining questions, or simply tried things in rehearsals that took the piece in a whole new direction. Building a sculpture, auctioning it off, framing the experience as a flight, and casting myself as a flight attendant—all of these discoveries and more were made in our play together.

This process was affirming of things I already believed or knew to be true about myself as an artist, and taught me a lot about what it means, now, for me to be a co-creator and director of devised work. My absolute favorite way of working is collaboratively. It is magic and it makes magic when a group of people are connected with one another and feel safe to play and experiment and go to vulnerable places. It creates the most connected, most surprising work, not just for artists, but for audiences—perhaps because, unlike with the traffic direction/stage picture model of directing, this work emerges from and lives in all our bodies, instead of primarily living inside one person’s head and existing as a breathing approximation of that dream; perhaps because artists carry work they co-create differently than work they simply act out. It’s also true, what literally everyone says, what every facilitator at arthaus has been trying to teach us, what I say all the time as a leader but often fail to do, what every pop psychologist and ancient theologian advises: be present, be honest, be vulnerable. I’m not too thick to recognize that the turning point in this process came when I stopped worrying about creating Emilia Seay Allen’s Timeless Artistic Manifesto in 20 Minutes, about what everyone else was thinking of me as an artist of a certain age and level of experience, about what my work means about my goodness, about what the biographers will write once I’m gone, and just asked for what I needed, and then followed it up with asking to do something that sounded fun. It’s not a coincidence that my artists became more engaged, either, once they knew what I wanted from them, and what I was asking them to be a part of. I’m not sure that I know a foolproof way to get the balance right every time, but this process truly felt like a collaborative devising process that I directed. Being in the exercises, rather than outside them, helped a lot. Being clear that I was the one ultimately responsible for shaping the piece helped, too. Clearly and directly saying, “please share your thoughts and ideas; I want this to be collaborative” also helped. Articulating my hunches and my questions allowed my artists to offer their ideas to that vision, unfinished and unpolished as it was. Creating, however we did this, an atmosphere of play, was the most helpful thing, as it always is.  

I don’t know if I liked Flight Risk as a piece of theatre. I know I had a lot of fun making it, and it seemed like most of the audience had a lot of fun experiencing and participating in it. I think I would have had fun if I were an audience member seeing it. I wish we had had more time together as a collective to polish, but because everyone was working on their pieces, too, time was scarce. I particularly wish we had had more time to polish the in-the-round element of the performance. I know how much work it takes to be able to keep clean sight lines and satisfying stage pictures for most of the audience most of the time when performing in the round, and we didn’t have time to do that work.

Unfortunately, because we had so little time after our lectures, I didn’t get a lot of feedback—ironic, given that my piece, more than most others, really sought audience input. But it taught me a lot about how I work now, and about where I am now as an artist still trying to find my voice again—and the courage to speak. And I think I gave the audience, and a lot of our class, an experience I believe we really needed: that of being together, and enjoying one another, and playing together. Because that is the only way we can create work powerful enough and true enough to be transformative—to transform ourselves, our audiences, and, with grace, some small corner of this glorious, collapsing world.