Anyone There?
How did you use your time in the Midwives?
I have been in the early stages of developing a new theater piece through research, conversations and developing collaborations with other artists.
What is a discovery you made about yourself or your process?
I have really been pushing myself to allow myself to articulate bigger ambitions for my work than I usually feel comfortable with. I have really appreciated how talking with Lynne has given me clarity about what I need to grow this project, and the different ways that I am alternately brave and scared about pursuing what I need.
Can you describe your piece / process for us?
"Anyone There?" aims to reinvigorate our capacity for meaningful connection. It will bring together lessons from social scientists, mediators working on bridge building and anti-polarization, as well as embodied experiences of community and connection from places like sports stadiums and churches. What happens to us when we move, cheer and sing with other people? "Anyone There?" will invite people to rediscover their natural instinct and capacity to meet the Other and see something of themselves.
A few thoughts from the earliest days of exploration for “Anyone There?” –
How do I turn this diagram that attempts to illuminate the forces at work in toxic polarization (from the amazing book, The Way Out by Peter T. Coleman) into an entertaining and delightful movement sequence? We do not know…
The Wave is amazing – a way for thousands of people to shift from spectating to participating. It’s easy, it’s fun, it makes us feel connected to everyone else in the stadium. Everything about this is inspiring to me.
Playing with balloons. My movement director and I are looking for ways to offer our audience experiences of delight that invite them to participate without self-consciousness. We are exploring joy and play as powerful ways to connect performers with audience, and audience with each other.
We have NO idea what this will ultimately look like!
PIECES - a personal essay by Jessica Bauman
“Your parents live like college students.” My stepmother said this to my kids when they were on vacation with her a few years ago. They were in their teens, and college was decades behind me.
It’s a shitty thing to say, but she’s not exactly wrong. The furniture in my house, especially in my living room, is a random collection of once-nice things that were never meant to live in the same room. A coffee table too big for the space in front of the sofa. A Yellow Chair, as we still charitably call it, so engrimed by years of boys playing and snacking and wiping dirty hands, not to mention seven years of being colonized by our black-haired dog, that there is almost no trace of its former Yellow. A piano which eats up a significant amount of prime real estate that was a necessity when my musician son was living at home, but is now virtually untouched; it has become a repository for mail, old magazines and a few colorful vases that are evidence of a brief effort to nicen up the joint. A sofa that is almost indescribably comfortable for an afternoon nap, but sheds feathers like an actual goose now that the worn-out chenille no longer contains them.
The rug is nice. I will go to bat for the rug.
It’s important to say up front that we could afford to buy nicer furniture. I know that lots of people live with furniture like mine, or even more bedraggled, because they have no choice. I do have a choice. Or at least, I have enough money in the bank to furnish my living room differently.
My sister, for example, has a house full of extremely lovely furniture. She has good taste, and the resources to buy the things that appeal to her. Whenever I visit her, I am envious – not of the actual furniture so much as the ability to accomplish this piece of adulting that seems to elude me entirely.
Last fall, after a visit to my sister’s, I returned home with a commitment to Refresh, as they say on Design Instragram.
I am a theater director. I have experience with design projects. Indeed, collaborating with designers is one of my favorite parts of the process of making a show. And my husband is an architect, for god’s sake. We should be able to do this.
I got names of interior designers who we might work with. I hated everything on their sites. I looked at the website for the chairs my sister has in her living room. I couldn’t imagine them living in mine. Just the words Design Instagram make me vaguely nauseous. I couldn’t bear to scroll. My brain wanted new furniture, but every cell in my body resisted doing what was required to make it happen.
Finally, I reached out to an actor friend who has a side hustle as a home organizer. I asked if she ever did design work. She does, but she lives in San Francisco, and I live in Brooklyn. Not ideal. But she said she could do a consult, make us a Mood Board to get us started. That sounded like something I could wrap my arms around.
It didn’t take long for me to start calling it the Bad Mood Board. I vaguely hated everything she suggested. Calling furniture “pieces” made me want to scream into a pillow.
It’s not that I am change averse. I have no desire to keep the Yellow Chair, or the too-big coffee table with its decades’ old adhesive left over from covering the corners with foam so that our toddlers wouldn’t cut their heads open when they toddled into the sharp edges. I’m not sentimental about adhesive residue. It’s just gross.
Mondays and Tuesdays at my mother’s house. Wednesdays and Thursdays at my father’s. Fridays and Saturdays back at my mother’s. Sundays with my dad. From the time I was five until I moved into my first dorm in college, I never slept in the same bed seven nights in a row. It was 1973 when my parents split, and no one knew what it would mean for kids. They thought that after a year or two, we would all be fine because kids are Resilient. No one understood about transitions, that the days you switch houses are harder. That maybe you shouldn’t set up a schedule where every day is the day you switch, or the day you just switched, or the day you are about to switch.
The silver lining to growing up this way is that I am an incredibly good packer. I can pull a suitcase together for a trip of any length in under half an hour. My mother-in-law used to spend days getting ready for a long trip, packing and unpacking her suitcase as she perseverated about what she might need to have with her. When people ask me the day before I leave for a trip if I’m already packed, I don’t actually understand the question. I pack at the last minute, and I almost never forget anything.
The lead lining of this particular cloud has been harder to bring into focus, but I have recently begun to suspect that one manifestation may be found in my living room.
As a director, I have done a lot of work with refugee and immigrant communities. I have heard them talk about their lives, watched them play and be joyous, seen them find ways to make something resembling a home in new and foreign places. So I understand in a deep way that my experience shuttling between my parents’ comfortable homes in upper Northwest DC is in no way comparable to fleeing violence or walking from Guatemala to Texas.
But there is a cliché about displaced people that resonates with me. They always have a suitcase packed and ready next to the door. Even if it’s the door of a home they have lived in for years, the hypervigilance does not fade.
I do not have an actual suitcase packed and ready next to the door of the house I have lived in for more than 20 years. But I have not quite settled in either. I might be wrong, but I truly believe that if I had to leave my house today and never return, I wouldn’t really miss it. I live here lightly. I have not put down roots.
Once, when I was in fourth grade, my father picked me and my sister up from school with all of our stuff shoved in the back of his car. He/we had been living with his girlfriend and her sons, and they had broken up (temporarily, it turned out – he married her a few years later). All the time we had been living with them, he had held on to the apartment where we lived before – something which now seems both financially and emotionally bonkers to me, but which I had no way to understand at the time. So we were moving back “home” to the apartment where we had lived before. My sister and I had no opportunity to pack ourselves, to say goodbye, to process this as an experience we were having. We might as well have been shoved into a laundry bag ourselves with the comforters and stuffed animals, schlepped to the next place along with our belongings.
The experts were right. I was resilient. I got really good at keeping my roots shallow, at being able to grow in a new pot.
When my friend was creating her Bad Mood Board for us, she kept asking questions that seemed to be about taste. What did I like? What kind of feeling did I want to create in my refreshed living room? She might as well have been asking these questions in Swahili. How could I possibly know what I want my living room to feel like? Parsing the question helps me get at the edges of the problem. “What do you want” implies a kind of agency about my living conditions that I don’t think I feel, even as a grown-ass adult. “Your living room” suggests a level of connection that eludes me. My inability to answer these questions makes me feel crazy, and a little bit broken. Are most people walking around with a knowledge of the kinds of “pieces” that would make their living room feel a particular way, a way that they can articulate as one they want?
All I know is that thinking about these questions floods my system with adrenaline – it’s fight or flight, baby. During the Bad Mood Board process, my husband and I visited a hipster furniture store in Williamsburg at my friend’s suggestion. Overwhelmed with rage, I hated everything in the store the instant we arrived. The physical space was quite small, so they didn’t actually have a lot of “pieces” for us to consider. But they had overly designed kitchen tchotchkes, accent pillows and – I am not making this up - at least three different varieties of weed-scented candles. If it hadn’t been pouring rain, I would have taken one look and walked out immediately. Instead, I stalked around the store railing about egregious materialism, late-stage capitalism and the death of all that is good.
There’s something about claiming my space, making it my own, that feels unspeakably dangerous to me. If I keep my psychic suitcase packed by the door, then it won’t matter when everything vanishes without warning.
Years ago, I read an article about a Syrian refugee who was living in Lebanon. He was desperate to get resettled somewhere permanent. But meanwhile, he had just planted a lemon tree that was going to take two years to bear fruit. I remember being amazed by this dual consciousness – ready to move at a moment’s notice, but also able to plant something that would reward him in two years.
I have lived in my house for more than twenty years, but I have never planted a lemon tree.
I haven’t looked at the Bad Mood Board in more than six months. I can’t really remember what it on it. I think there’s a yellow couch.
I am trying to make incremental progress. A few months ago, we did actually give away the coffee table through a neighborhood listserv. A sweet young man was happy to take it off our hands. We have replaced it with two small circular tables from the ‘70s that used to belong to my dad and were passed on to us in some transaction I can’t even remember. They are also kind of terrible, but at least they fit the space in front of our sofa better. At first, I thought they wouldn’t be there long – just a temporary place holder. But now I am used to them. They seem like they belong there, fitting in with the rest of our college student hodge podge. It’s entirely possible they will be with us forever.