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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