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| Guess Who's Coming to Dinner: Some Thoughts on Thoughts, Performance and Fear Falling ill terrifies me, not because it augurs death, but because it forces me into the sickbed for a few days, where I'm vulnerable and alone and the demons in my own mind take root: self-doubt, anxiety, pessimism, disturbing images and thoughts zoom in and around my head. Thoughts of loss, images of death, shame over yesterday's unpleasant exchange with the grocery store clerk, envy of a friend's marriage, despair over war, fear that I've lost my wallet, my favorite shirt or my mind; all fly as bullets into brain, through my nostrils and my third eye, lodging in my bowels, my knee joints. I shift around in the bed, hoping to free myself; this might change the content of the barrage but not its ugliness or its hold on me. In solo space, tiny and powerless on an empty stage, I can fear exactly the opposite: that nothing will come to visit me. I hear nothing, I hold nothing, there is nothing, this is nothing, I am nothing. Time is ticking away; I'd better come up with the goods. For all the years that I've thrown myself into this work over and over, the solo has been the treacherous terrain, the place in the work that everyone makes nervous jokes about. I can make a studio of students ripple with relieved laughter, simply by saying, Okay, I know it's the first day, but I'd like to begin with 5 minute solos…just kidding! Because at least if we're together, someone else might start things off, stop the drought. We can lean on each other. How can I be equally terrified that there is so much awaiting me inside me when I'm pasted to the sickbed and that there is nothing inside of me when I'm in solo space? How can both be true? Both are true. There is always nothing and always everything, because these are just names our mind gives to the same thing: the mental, physical and emotional phenomena that course through us like a river. Only fear or doubt makes us fight the stream. Fear makes me dread a vivid sickbed vision of dying alone, doubt makes me reject one after another of images that come to me when I'm mid-improvisation because I think that they're "trite". If only we could learn to dip our cups into the river in spite of our doubts and fears. If only we could offer ourselves a cup regardless. We are thirsty, the audience is thirsty. That's why we're all here. This all cracked open for me recently at a workshop in New Mexico, when I was struggling not with solo, ironically, but with duet. The question was: How do we move from solo into duet without losing the connection with ourselves? Ruth offered this: You're in solo space, but you're doing a duet. Go back and forth, responding to each other, like 2 people at a dinner table, like dinner guests interacting. And then imagine that there are 100 dinner guests. You can wait for years for insight into questions you can't answer, that annoy and sadden you. There's no way of knowing when it will all ease up. Somehow, in the next 10 minutes in that hot, dry studio, I stepped into a new freedom and spaciousness simply because the metaphor contained what I needed to let go. This isn't me, I thought. These are imaginary dinner guests living through me. So I relaxed and watched these states of being pass through me as they met each other through movement, through sound, through physical narrative, sometimes through all three at once. I was light, I was amused, I was curious. I could feel my heart thumping in my chest. This, I thought, is why I do this work. Because I want to get outside of my secure world, my ordinary sense of who I am and what's real, and go on a ride. Jelaluddin Balkhi Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet much beloved these days for his tenderness, his call for self-compassion and his accessible, beautiful metaphors, likened living the human life to welcoming a collection of visitors. This being human is a guest house, he reminds us. Every morning a new arrival. He also means that every moment brings a new arrival. What we train ourselves to do in Action Theater is to welcome them all, moment to moment to moment, and let them whisper their secrets to us and through us. And for this, Rumi reminds us, we are fortunate. Be grateful for whoever comes,Let's go back to the sickbed, where I lie under attack from mind demons. It is especially to the ill, the bedridden—metaphorical or actual—that Rumi directs this poem. These guests are not so welcome at my table as those who gathered around me in the studio that day. How can I possibly feign politeness and offer them a plate? Rumi is perfectly clear on this question: Welcome and entertain them all! He goes on: Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,In or outside of improvisation, just existing as humans, we can yield to this continual stream of visitors, letting them live with and through us until they've been satisfied. Or, we can cling to fear, doubt and insecurity behind a locked door. When the doorbell rings, we must choose. |
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