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Getting home last night was utterly bizarre. I wasn’t aware of being homesick at all during my time at Double Edge, but walking in the door of my own little apartment, just the way I left it, was a palpable relief. The 13 hours in transit probably helped that feeling along. Stupid layovers. I went to make dinner and for a moment I couldn’t remember where I keep the pots. It feels like I’ve been away for a year instead of three weeks.

I wrote a bunch on the plane, and I thought I’d jot down a few last thoughts to sort of tie off. This blog has helped the processing, er, process, immensely.

I spent a lot of time at Double Edge with my internal defenses up hard. I have no idea if that’s because I was becoming more aware of my own resistances that were always there, or if it is because my subconscious saw what I was being asked to do and slammed them up in fear. Those internal hesitations are gonna take years of massage to melt away. I’m glad I have a way to start.

The intensive was amazing, and also sort of lonely. Is that a natural outgrowth of this work? The company members there are grounded and forceful and kind and awake, but there’s also something hard about most of them. They don’t smile, necessarily, when they pass each other in the hallway; it’s like the social niceties are a layer that they don’t bother with. All of them, in fact, seem like the most honest group of people I’ve encountered, which doesn’t really make them friendlier. They all seem a little older than they are.

There was a refrain in Matthew’s comments aboutthe tendency to hide oneself from the work, which is something I’ve been struggling with myself for years now. I’ve stripped away some of the layers of obfuscation that used to be between me and the world over the years, but Double Edge showed me a new angle on the problem, and new ways that my sneaky brain devises to keep me from showing myself. I avoid leading. I fear imposing my impulse on anyone else’s work, and in the meantime I leave my work quietly by the side of the road and hope nobody trips on it (though of course I desperately want everyone to notice it, despite doing everything I can to make it inconspicuous.) I doubt it early and abandon it too soon. I maybe need to push the other direction for a while, and forgive myself in the event that I step on anyone’s toes.

I think my insomnia during the first couple weeks is an indication of how opening this work is–I have a history of not being able to sleep very well during the most creatively productive times in my life. At Double Edge, I became accustomed to operating on a much higher frequency than normal. I hope I can maintain that level of vibration, at least for a little while, at least until this next play gets written.

That’s another thing–on the plane home, thoughts were pouring out of my pen, and I noticed that every time I started really cooking, really juicing up ideas, I would feel simultaneously exhilaration and the urge to stop. I’d get hungry suddenly, or want to check the time, or have to pee. I think that’s the same impulse that stops me in the work, and I think it is tied somehow to all those internal resistances I’m recognizing. I remember in college when I was doing homework I didn’t want to do, I’d think of all these legitimate reasons to do something else–I’d be tired, or hungry, or remember a phone call I needed to make. Same thing. Oddly, I often feel both the inclination to stop and the ecstasy of continuing in the exact same moment. Will there ever be a time in my life when I can simply enjoy the flying wildly forward without the pull back to the ground? Or is the work really just about accepting that weight and continuing with it, instead of despite it? Maybe it’s a necessary part of being mortal. Maybe that weight is what makes the flying real–if there is no gravity, who cares if you’re not touching the ground?

Along those lines–in the second week when my thigh muscle was pulled, I encountered the seductive draw of the minor injury. When you feel you can’t go any more and you want badly to stop, the thought “well, I should take it easy so I don’t exacerbate this injury” has a TON of influence. I still haven’t sorted that one out–at a certain point, you really do need to be careful of your body when it’s wounded; but it’s so, so hard to tell necessary caution from escapist caution.

Whenever I came to some realization about the work, I’d be suffused with the hope that I would be able to apply the lesson immediately in training. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case–knowing where I wanted to go didn’t seem to stop me from being dumb in the work. I remember Matthew saying something–I think I wrote it earlier in here–about how we don’t know anything, we can only ever stumble across it. That’s beautiful and frustrating. Understanding doesn’t help much. Okay. Damn.

After many of the later trainings and some of the runs, I had the distressing feeling that I could have put more into it; could have worked harder, could have abandoned more. I wonder if I have an infinite capacity for that kind of doubt; am I in fact consistently increasing my output, but disappointed because I didn’t actually reach my outer limit (which I am slowly discovering is lots farther off than I used to think)? Or am I shying away from doing more, as I learn how much the work is asking of me?

Something I think I never grasped in the work is how to bring a mind to it in a constructive way. There was lots of talk about having our own personal dramaturgy, and coming into training with a story or a question already formed to apply to the work, but I did that far less than I could have. One training, we began by looking at images from art books, and it was one of the best for me. If I ever go back to Double Edge, that might be the big question for me: how can I approach this in a way that’s not random, path-of-least-resistance kind of work? Though the presentation that we put together at the end was a conglomeration of lovely moments with a glimmer of sense, I wouldn’t be proud of it as a conscious piece of theatre; it didn’t really have a cohesive point of view, or take any impulse particularly far. I’d be interested in learning how to use this work to make something that I would find meaningful.

I would like to go back to Double Edge sometime, in a year or a few maybe, if they’d have me for an internship or another intensive. I feel like there’s so much left in this work for me to learn. It’s awfully satisfying stuff to get my hands on–it’s like…like what? Like something the consistency of raw meat, maybe a little rotten so it’s soft and comes apart easier. But minus the smell. Substitute instead the smell of my own sweat and farts and healing wounds and salty tears. I wouldn’t at all mind tearing into it again.

I can’t shake the feeling that the Farm is going to change in some drastic way in the next two or three years. For some reason I feel some urgency, if I go back, to go back before that happens.

Fundamental unproductive doubt of the day: is this sort of study worthwhile at all? Unable to quantify objectively the benefits of the theatre work I’m learning, how do I know that I’m making progress? What if I believe I’m moving forward when really I’m just constructing elaborate intellectual fantasies that don’t have any real impact on my actual work?

I don’t really believe that, but it crept into the landscape for a moment.

That’s what I got for tonight. I’m experiencing little waves of ridiculous excitement as I enter this next phase of my life in the theatre. People who have been reading along: my gratitude for the excuse to explain this stuff to myself. Life is gooood. And now I’m going to bed.

xoxo
Alissa

This part is really hard: repetition. When something you’ve done once, in the freedom and spirit of improvisation, must return, and still feel as impulsive and connected as its original creation, over and over again, or with limitations and considerations that you didn’t have the first time around; blocking.

I’ve been struggling with this for the last day and a half. And what I am learning right now is not how to do it right, but how to recognize my ego intruding on my work. I want to be good at it; I’m not. Of course not; this is the first time I have worked in exactly this way. But some demon inside me wants to be brilliant every moment, all the time, and has no patience for my floundering as I attempt this new form.

That demon: stupid. Henceforth, I promise to be gleefully bad at this work. I have to, in order to ever learn anything.

G’night!
Alissa

Just wanted to post while I’m still buzzing from this morning’s AWESOME training. Last night was good too. It’s getting hard in a new way; now that we’re working with specific material instead of making new stuff up all the time, we have to be careful not to let our ideas about how the material needs to go interfere with the truth and real exploration of what we’re doing. Matthew has been taking a more and more active hand directing us, and so we’re dealing with the additional distraction of someone telling you to do stuff that you then have to justify and make your own, instead of just doing whatever feels natural.

But here’s the discovery from this morning, something that I realized during training and that Matthew reaffirmed in his comments to us afterward: many of us, me included, are prone to moving on from the work we’re creating way too quickly.

It’s that simple. You start doing something, you push it as far as you can think to push it, and then you look for something else to move on to. But the training only really begins once you’re out of ideas. It’s when you don’t know where to go or what to do next that the work really starts, and all you have to do is know that, and stay with it, and suddenly you’re taking your improvisations to that deeper level I’ve been wondering forever how to find.

So many promising beginnings I’ve abandoned because I thought I was done with them, only to walk away before the really interesting part was going to happen! I’m looking at the work in a new way again, and it is good. I need to go to the place where I don’t know what happens next, and stay there instead of continuing to seek out territory I know.

I type it, and it sounds obvious. But I didn’t realize what I was doing, before; I only saw the limit of my ideas being exhausted, and concluded that that was all there was. To keep pushing is the lesson here, which is a lesson I keep thinking I have learned, only to learn it again in a slightly different configuration.

Good training is good. I am buzzed and happy and warm and only now starting to feel the pain I will surely feel for training so hard all morning. Oh boy.

In other body news: for the last few days, my ankles have been really swollen. I’m like a pregnant lady. I have no idea what’s causing that.

Love!
Alissa

If you are perfectly capable of the thing you are attempting to do in training, then you’re missing the point.

Question: we are tasked with imbuing our movements with meaning, significance, presence, during training, even when following. But we are discouraged from ‘acting’. How can we create a story without acting? Or am I wrong that I should avoid it?

There is a moment in training that I’m not sure if I’ve described where everything clicks–either the endorphine/adrenaline surge takes over, or you become completely present, or completely engaged in whats going on, or rather all of that at once. Todd, another student here, called it ‘breaking on through to the other side’ once in my hearing. I kind of experience it as igniting–one minute I am everyday, and the next minute I am warm and moving freely; my aches and pains disappear, I feel the weight of my body travel upward instead of pulling me down, and I stop worrying for a little bit about whether I’m being creative enough or too pushy or too passive and just enjoy myself. It’s a sudden transition sometimes, and sometimes I notice that I have been in that state for a while.

It’s delicate, though–the moment I think “I’m there! I’m in that state” then it starts to slip and I have to stop rejoicing. And if I ever experience a moment of doubt, uncertainty, hesitation, that makes it slip too. I didn’t attain it at all during this morning’s run or training, and I missed it. A lot. Tired today, and feeling my aches and pains. But so little time left!

Off to do design work–
Alissa

This week is taking on a much different flavor than the first two, and I probably won’t have much time to post for the rest of my time here (all four days of it. Jeez, it’s gone by fast!) But I wanted to get at least one more good one in before I get home.

This morning’s training was really interesting. It was pouring rain, and we didn’t go running for the second day in a row, and oddly I’m really missing it. Instead, we started right into training in the space, and it was a technical and object-oriented training.

I can’t remember now (and I’m too lazy to check) what I wrote about the day that I cried all through the morning training. But part of my frustration and exhaustion was the fact that Matthew kept insisting I climb the silks (spanish web, tissu, that fabric that hangs from the ceiling that aerialists use) over and over again, higher than I was doing; but I felt out of energy, and I had hit a point where I literally could not lift myself off the ground at all any more, despite having successfully climbed it plenty of times before. To be on the brink of frustration and then to have someone keep demanding you do something that you don’t want to do, that hurts to do, and that you feel you can’t do is…well, it’s the sort of thing that makes me want to cry. Which I did, then.

Anyway, ever since then Matthew has been pushing me back at those damn silks, over and over again, as my personal challenge. He saw me hit a wall, and the training here is all about confronting your limitations, and so he sends me back, over and over. And I work on them until I run out of energy or courage and then escape and do some other training until I am pulled back to the silks. It is simultaneously infuriorating and gratitude-inspiring; this is provocation I have not yet learned to do for myself, to push myself to keep doing something that is increasingly painful. But I hadn’t yet learned to deal with this limitation by this morning.

In the space there is also a net hanging from the ceiling, suspended at three different points. I’d been eyeing it for days since they hung it, without having the opportunity or the guts to climb up into it, though several other folks had and I’d seen how it worked. This morning I had a lot of energy and the net was available and I clambered into it with assistance from a fellow student, had a good time in there for a while (it’s really pretty fun) and came down. I had explored it to my satisfaction for the time being.

But shortly afterward in the training, Matthew paired me up with another intensive student, Kevin, the other student who was using the silks in his solo piece. He told us to work on the silks and the net, to be together but switching off, and to stick with these objects. He also forbade anyone to help me get into the net, and my first time getting into it alone was an arduous chore (though Jeremy, another woman in the company, did show me how first.)

So we worked like that for the rest of the training, Kevin and I, and it was alternately brutal and wonderful, and sometimes both. After we figured out that you could go straight from the silks to the net and vice versa, Matthew came up to us and said “Great! Now you can go from one to the other, you don’t need to touch the ground any more.” Kevin and I laughed in an appalled kind of way, but Matthew was serious, and for a full half hour we worked and traveled and related without touching the ground once.

I can’t write any kind of description that would make you understand how difficult this training was for me. There were moments when I thought I might cry again; but I had a good partner in Kevin, and he kept me sane just by returning my gaze when I was ready to freak out. But my arms were burning, and I was working a good deal higher above the ground than I usually do, but the swinging out on the silks from the net was actually really glorious, and the sudden ability to do more with the things that have been stumping me for over a week now was closer to freedom than I had been. My back is covered with rope burns from the net and I wear them as badges of pride. I haven’t overcome those bastards, but I made headway, and it felt good.

Today there was our final Tae Kwon Do class (sad…I had gotten to really look forward to it) and postering in town for our final student presentation that happens on Sunday. Then a second talk with Stacey, the founder of Double Edge, in which she elaborated on some of her ideas about theatre from the first time we chatted with her. There was a long digression into making theatre for an audience or not, and how the actors need always to be completely alive onstage as we are in training, to be always improvising, even inside the form of the finished play, so that no one in the audience goes to sleep. To stimulate, to awaken, to excite–these are the things that Stacey wants to do with her theatre.

Tonight, we started training as usual, but after a few minutes it became a work session, shaping the pieces that we are beginning to make that we’ll be showing in a few days. It was long and we ended late, and I’m beginning to get the sense that our time off is going away. We already know that we don’t get a day off this week; by the time I get on a plane to go home, I will have worked in this pace for eight days straight. Oddly, that doesn’t seem daunting at all. I have a ton of energy today still, even though it’s nearly two in the morning still. I better go drink some warm milk and try to sleep.

Love to you all! I owe a bunch of you emails that you certainly won’t see until sometime next week. Thank you for stickin’ around and keeping me sane. Till next time,
Alissa

Both of my inner thighs have now lightly scabbed over, which, I modestly submit, is an absolutely charming improvement over my previous condition.

Also: when did the hair on my legs get so dark?

So much happens in a day here that when three go by without updates, it’s hard to know where to start. I think I can only do today, and let the last two days be lost in the mists of time.

This morning we embarked on our run as normal, except Carlos had let us know that there would be water at some unnamed destination that we could swim in, so bring whatever we needed for that. It was sunny and warm, and I was tired but warmed up quickly.

This was the longest run yet, distance-wise. Fortunately there weren’t too many hills, but we ran for miles straight out. As I found myself flagging, I used the thing I had discovered before about the reservoir of energy that always seems to be full when I check; it was easier to access this time, and required less constant struggle to remind myself that it was there. As I ran, I thought about something Matthew said last week, about how the work is to keep fooling ourselves into being free. I was trying to articulate to myself just what it means to be free, and at the same time I had to renew my internal energy, and suddenly something clicked for me about the running–I am running in order to be free. Free from my perceptions of my own limitations. And I realized that the energy I was tapping wasn’t just inside of me, because it’s infinite; I couldn’t possibly contain at one time all the energy that there is available for me to run with. I’m not respionsible for generating it; I merely reach out and tap it. And all the people running with me were using that same energy, and it connected us with all the other people in the world who are tapping it. And if someone’s lost their primal connection to the source, you can tap it for them, and feed it to them. God, it sounds inane to me when I type it, but this was a real epiphany for me: it’s infinite. It’s infinite. Dear god, it’s infinite.

And the freedom is more than just freedom to push myself physically. It is also freedom from the anxiety of making the wrong decision; whether I follow the ‘wrong’ person running, or do the ‘wrong’ thing in training…instead of worrying about that, I can simply push forward, burning with this infinite force, and let go of worry. Any time I need courage or support or strength to do what I need to do, I just reach out and tap this current, and I have it. And so my mantra while I ran, instead of “there’s more there”, became: “I run in order to become free.” In order to learn to reach this source when I need it, and strengthen my connection to it. And suddenly my feet were wings, and I clocked the miles without heaving and panting and without minding the burn in my legs, because I had a real reason to do it. It wasn’t to get where I was going. I run in order to become free. It was euphoric.

My euphoria abated somewhat when the group I was running with got lost in the woods for an hour and ended up rejoining the group without finding the beautiful summit that they had apparently all climbed and viewed from, but we did catch up with them in time to dip into a beautiful pond and climb a gently-sloped stream and sing inside an echo-y water pipe, so that was all right. And the run back, for me, was triumphantly easy.

The only really sad thing was that I was running home in wet shorts, and managed to chafe my inner thighs terribly, and they hurt more than anything so minor should hurt. The rest of the day has been about avoiding pain for me, which is a shame.

Because half the group had been lost, we got back to the farm an hour later than scheduled, rushed through lunch, and went to do some directed scenework (which would have been really fun if I hadn’t been wincing in pain from my delicate thighs. Jeez, if it’s not one thing, it’s another; my pulled thigh healed, my blisters turned nicely into pain-free callouses, so of course I had to hurt something else.) Those went longer than intended, as well, and we had just a 15-minute break to change before Tae Kwon Do (hurrah for nice, wide fighting stances! Didn’t bug my chafed thighs at all) and then in for dinner. We were supposed to have individual work time before training and I had planned to do some necessary writing and processing, but then, last-minute, Michal offered to run a poi-spinning workshop for anyone who was interested and I couldn’t bear to miss it, so I still have that writing to do.

So straight from that into training, and it’s been a long and exhausting day. My thighs were burning, but I dove into training and found the zone quickly, happily. But since our notes from last night’s training had to do with certain specific things, like developing stories more than we have been and taking character relationships past the natural ceiling they seem to be hitting, I started getting more and more in my head, and I lost the hang of training, of what we were doing, of my relationship with anyone, and by the end was flailing so badly I felt like crying. We ended without notes, and I don’t know if I could have borne them.

I had really been hoping that my understanding this morning would translate into unhindered brilliance in the studio. Maybe that was my problem; I had an expectation of how it would go, which seems always to be deadly. But far from the euphoria of this morning, I’m feeling discouraged this evening; recriminating myself for not doing more, doing differently, doing better. (Get over it, ‘Lissa. Remember how it’s not about how good you do?)

Yeah, yeah. Shower. Sleep. Put something on those inner thighs and do it again tomorrow. That’s all I can do. That’s enough.

I miss you all,
Alissa

Hey! So we’re all driving to Boston tonight to see a show by Double Edge’s sister company, Mabou Mines. woohoo! I’ll be staying overnight at my buddy Ben’s house and hanging out in Boston until tomorrow evening on our day off. So, uh…still pretty out of touch, but for one day, my cell phone will be working! Erin, if you find out which it is tomorrow, you can send me a text.

Bye guys! Off to the big city!
Alissa

The magic thing about this place is that as soon as I identify an issue I’m having with the work, I’m surrounded by answers. Last night, I was wiped out and despairing, feeling like I had been tired for four days in a row, wondering how on earth I was ever going to get caught up on sleep when there is literally no time for it. This morning when I rolled out of bed after 7 hours of sleep (a good night here) I was bleary-eyed and lethargic. During the run, I kept up with the crowd for longer than usual before lagging behind as I usually do. But this time, as I struggled to keep moving and the group in front got farther and farther ahead, Matthew came alongside me to encourage me, get me to speed up, which sometimes is inspiring and other times utterly aggravating. It was somewhere in between for me this morning, until, as we dodged through the woods with the rest of the group barely in sight, he said, “You’re holding out on me, Alissa! I know it in my heart! The game is to catch up!” And disappeared behind me to encourage the last lagger.

Holding out? I’m dying here! But his belief that I had more strength in me than I was displaying was encouraging and downright flattering, and I wanted to believe it was true. And I tried moving my arms and legs faster–and hey, they obeyed! And every time I started flagging (ie every 15 seconds or so) I said to myself ‘there’s more there’ and reached into my core, into what I started visualizing as a clear ball of energy that was far from depleted, which I could tap at any time. It worked as a series of constant rejuvinations, and I ran harder than I have before after so long. It was also mentally exhausting.

What was astonishing was the level of my own resistance to this practice. Over and over, the other voice in my head tried to shout out the productive one. ‘I’m done…I have to pee…I hate this…I’m a terrible runner.’ And there was an actual struggle that I actually percieved between the two impulses–one that insisted I had tons more energy to give, and one that wanted no more than a good excuse to stop and rest. But the first voice clearly had the facts on her side, because I was in fact still running, and clearly capable of running faster and longer than I had been insisting to myself what my limits were. It wasn’t fun…but I could do it just fine.

Since this morning, I’ve had an incredible amount of energy. I burned through the morning training, bounced through music, worked without hesitation with my hazy ideas in design, and though I have personal work time now, I have no desire to go and take a nap.

Last night, we had a formal talk with Stacey, the founder and director of Double Edge, the only one here who’s been with it for all 25 years straight (maybe with the exception of Carroll, who has left and returned but always kinda had her foot in the door.) She concieves of theatre as something that happens when you do the impossible. If it’s not impossible, why should anyone bother to see it? It’s a daunting sort of notion. But there’s also this idea that you have to be other, you have to push yourself to the brink of what you know your limitations are and then go right past them. Oh! And another thing she said was that expectations for yourself are deadly. Hopes, dreams, desires, all these things are valuable, but expectations will kill any chance you have of becoming something that you cannot conceive of.

She said a lot more that was inspiring, and I wrote a bunch of it down. This place is utterly insane. But as one of her co-founders (no longer with the company) allegedly said, “You’re not gonna make it if you aren’t crazy.”

Amen.
Alissa

Man, why I always gotta be so tired all the time?!