Towards the end of my Columbia experience, an esteemed professor of mine mused that he "laid on the couch for four months" after finishing grad school and his thesis. I laughed in appreciation at this and found myself conflicted-lay on the couch for four months?!?! With all of this momentum? That's not how I work! Oh, but the couch does look comfortable...
So, I tried.
It turned out that my couch wasn't so comfortable, after all, albeit pretty.
And there was so much to do! Amanda, the Artistic Director for Striding Lion, was heading out West with Eloise and Ben, bound for the mountains, Ben's law school, and Eloise's new home state of Colorado. So, there were meetings, transitional eekings of keeping the company strong, inspired and fiscally sound. And there was planning, on my end, devising programming as the "becoming" Artistic Director, and the opportunity to frame and harvest the programming and community I've been laying out for nearly a decade through journals, teaching, personal musings, observations, and practice. There is no couch laying in that, but there was also a sense of stasis that became my couch, in many ways. Add to that, my unexpected unemployment, due to arts funding cutbacks resulting in my summer teaching position being cut, and I found myself living off my emergency credit cards, and my two bartending shifts that are muse-intensive, but by no means gainful employment...
This summer was fraught with both feast and famine. The feast was in building opportunity with Striding Lion, structuring a kick-ass season, concern over economic stability, waiting to learn what funding will come through, and which ones will fail with our paranoid and flawed economy. The famine came in waves of recognition and manifested itself in spending hours trying to configure back-up plans, watching them fail, feeling caught and tangled in an isolation that I hadn't expected. I had planned to use this time as a gift-to learn to play my guitar well enough to perform live, learn my Logic software in order to record, write the great american novel. I did none of these things. I freaked out, trying to figure a way in which to survive. Is that a couch?
If it is, I don't like it, and I refuse to lay on it. I suppose it's wonderful that my couch is a lovely, yet uncomfortable, antique loveseat. Not a couch at all.Whenever I tried to settle in it, I could never get comfortable. I just didn't fit enough to relax or settle. It's better this way.
Four months have passed. I'm back in action. Stasis session is over. Striding Lion is roaring along in the INCUBATOR series at the Department of Cultural Affairs(check out the blog at http://dcatheater.org/blog/) , which will culminate in our "Pioneers" performance at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, September 29th. There are two sections to this: a for-youth production based on the songs, stories, diaries and history of the Westward Expansion, and "Directional Shifts"- a production that is an introduction to the "Night Roars-live art series" in which our artists explore our own responses to the definition of "pioneer" in our current time and place. It's all very exciting and a certain exploration.
Now that I have dismissed stasis, I have learned that it's crucial to have a couch. I need a place to rest. So, for my birthday(September 1st), I built one out of my childhood wrought iron bedframe. It didn't really take much- a mattress, a boxspring, pillows made from remnant fabric from the local JoAnn Fabrics.It was a bit of a rescue effort, on multiple levels that I won't divulge here, and it makes sense. I'm happy to build something new and functional out of my history. Points for being able to sleep upon it. I recognize that it is still not truly a couch, but I clearly don't dig on couches.
