The Aftermath

Coming back from tour is hard.  Or perhaps I should say coming down from tour is hard.  After every sequence of performances -- home season or on tour -- I crash.  Emotionally and physically.  Over the years, I have learned some coping strategies.

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you'll know that packing stresses me out.  More than travelling, even.  Unpacking, however, I find therapeutic.  My medical stuff gets unpacked immediately because I need it that night.  The rest happens over the course of the week.  First, though, there's the sorting.  I take out the remnants of food, my wooden silverware, my used coffee mugs and water bottle.  These go away; Wizard declares them health hazards and heads for the dishwasher.  Then, there's the clothes, the often still damp rehearsal and performance clothes (those truly *are* health hazards, but he seems not to notice).  Rehearsal gear goes in the machine washable hamper. Costumes go in the handwash basket.  Any unused clothes that have not been in too close contact with the former go back in the closet or wherever they should have come from.  I pull out my wash bag and check my toiletries: refill any lotions, shampoos, hair product tubes, throw away any bits and pieces that got stuffed in the bag because I was lazy, and put the bag away.  Same goes for the makeup bag.  I make a list of anything that needs replacing.

After that, and yes, I do do it in this order, I check my wheelchair repair kit.  It's usually fine; I put it in the car.  Then, I check my wheelchair.  This week, I have some serious maintenance.  One of my sideguards fell off at the after party; I busted a move and .... disintegration.  The screws shot everywhere.  I can replace the screws; that's easy enough.  BUT this should not have happened.  I checked my chair before I left, but I didn't check the security of the screws; I just saw that there were 4 screws in approximately the right place.  Had this actually happened on stage, it would have posed a significant risk to me and my colleagues.  Plus, I would not have been able to do some of the moves; I use sideguards as support. My bad.

When I'm done with this part, I go through the remaining junk at the bottom of the suitcase.  I wipe the case and air it out, if necessary.  Then, depending on how long this has taken and when the next trip is, I either put the stuff back in or put the case away.

The processing of my stuff allows me to filter the performances and work my way through the intense loneliness I feel when I am not that closely connected to my colleagues.  I revisit the mistakes I made; I decide which ones need practice and which were random.  I revisit the high points.  I think -- though there is no proof of it -- that putting away my things allows me to reestablish the boundaries I need to live in the every day world.  Performance asks you to be so open, so vulnerable.  I can't live in the world with that degree of unprotectedness, so I need the time to reestablish some limits.  I polish my stuff.  Clean and order my stuff.  Gradually, I set myself and my world back on the right axis.

Seeing And Being Seen

Repertory companies keep a "repertory" of work alive.  That is, at any given time, we have a certain number of pieces in active repertory.  These are our stock, our wares, if you like.  We can draw on them at any time, selecting and tailoring programmes for different venues.  The weird thing about it is that you can end up performing the same piece over and over and over and, yes, ....  again.  It's not quite like being on Broadway where you might do the same show most of the nights of the week for a very long time.  But over time, you do build a deep familiarity with your rep work.

I say familiarity because, really, we don't do the same work over and over again.  To be sure, the same things happen again and again (improvisation and, umm, unplanned choreography a.k.a mistakes excepted).  We do walk forward at this point.  We do do x, y, and z to certain counts of music.  But none of that means that we repeatedly dance the same piece.  Show after show, the same choreography reveals a different piece because we are alive, conscious and intentional in the material.  (For my money, that's how I know the choreography is good -- does it have the potential to be rich, satisfying and different three years in?)

Some nights, the music starts, and I am caught up in an intense fierceness.  It's like a smell on the breeze; we all scent it.  And then, we go.  Some nights, we seem more relaxed.  Some nights, there's a journey, a switching backwards and forwards.  Some nights, I feel like I can't find where my colleagues are.  I wonder if my being in a different emotional space is communicable as part of the performance.  

Our performances here have been different.  I felt we were, well, I don't know.  The intensity came from a different place, yet one that we all felt.  I have never felt so alive and connected.  I remember noticing the smells of our bodies, the smell of the air.  The quality of the light.  And I'm finding that I can't write about it.  It was so personal, so powerful that blogging it feels intrusive.  I hope though that the connection between us was visible to the audience, because seeing them was part of what made our performance so different.

The audiences were so visible to us that I felt that they were part of our performance.  In theaters and dance performance spaces, we often cannot see much of the audience -- occasionally, we can see people in the front row.  Sometimes, a piece asks for the house lights to be raised; occasionally, the ambient light from the stage reveals indistinct forms in raked seating.  This time, however, I could see people's expressions, their stances (some people were standing).  I'm surprised by just how much I know about the audience.  I felt people move with us; I saw people move in to check something out.  I felt people trying to figure out how we were doing stuff.  The audience was so alive that I took a risk.

Stage lights can be dizzying; they are very bright -- too bright to look at directly; they change colour; they come and go; there's no stable anchor point.  To mark where you are on stage, you often have to pick an architectural feature: the exit lights at the back of the auditorium, the lights from the tech booth or tech table in the house.  Sometimes, floor lighting is available.  Because the space was so light, there were more than a couple of architectural features that I could have picked.  But I didn't.  I chose a person.

I kept seeing a woman in the audience; every time I looked up, I saw this woman.  She was in my line of sight; she was my center point.  I didn't want to keep staring at her, but she was there.  She radiated an energy that was equivalent to the one I was feeling on stage.  After about two minutes, I felt I could trust her; I decided to use her as my anchor.  I've never done that before.  I've never picked a person to help me be stable, to help me find my place on the stage.  It was an incredible experience.  Not only was I connected to the other dancers, I was directly connected to the audience.

I don't know what this woman saw; if she could feel me; if my connection to her was visible to other audience members.  But I do know that this venue, this person gave me a performance experience that I've not had.  It will stay with me for a long, long time.

Getting Settled

We've been here for two days now.  I'm on tour with West Coast.  Hooray -- Yes, that means I am testing my arm.  I'm back, I think; I'm back.  OK.  Going gently.  Will have to see how my arm holds up.

But to my point.  We've been here, now, for two days.  Touring is an amazing adventure.  We were met with a chirpy welcome: "Our rooms are grandfathered in...."  I've always wondered whose grandfather is responsible for all this.  But, as it turns out, the room is doable, this time for me at least.   We're on a three day trip with the express purpose of taking concert dance out of the urban theatre space into communities with less access to such performances.  It's a sponsored tour that is spread out across the state over the duration of several weeks.  We will be going back and forth and back and forth.

When we roll up to a full theatre, we usually have a full production team -- production manager, lights and sound peoples, stage crew, costume dressers.  Getting us on stage is a big (and costly) thing.  The spaces we dance in are designed for performance -- play or dance, but not usually orchestral music -- we can trust in the architecture of the floor and the sightlines.  We know we will look good, that we will be able to present the work as the choreographer intended it to be seen (more or less), and that we will be safe.  There are no such guarantees in venues like the ones planned for the next couple of months.  We will be performing in all kinds of places.

Here's an example of some of the differences.  At every location, we need to run the pieces to check for spacing. Every stage is different; you need to know where the rough parts are. How far you can go. How much effort you need to make that turn and land precisely. You need to know where the other dancers are. Whether the floor is spongy or springy. It's just part of the job to adjust.

Tonight's floor is linoleum on concrete. It's a community cafeteria/ hall. It's brutally hard. Sticky, yet unexpectedly slick.  There's no give. Everything wheel-wise happens so quickly: my tires slip and skid. I've danced on floors like this when we do school assemblies, but I've never done full repertory on a floor like this. I'm a little scared that I will fall and be hurt or hurt someone else.  This is going to be tough; it will take every last bit of skill that we have and trust in each other.

This community has made us welcome.  There are temporary ramps; they've rented lights and hung them.  The lights aren't where we would expect; instead, sunlight pours through the skylights adding a luminescence none of us could anticipate.  Then, after sunset, the darkness is softer; we can see members of our audience.  Usually, it's a sea of blackness out there.  This time, though, the dusk is gentle.  People's faces seem softer; their clothes less distinct.  They are lit from overhead by our lights; it's a mutual experience.  I suppose that we look as red as they do.

That, I think, is the biggest difference between performing on a concert stage in a dedicated performance space and performing in a community space: we can see people.  They (and we) aren't hidden by stage wings, light trees, aprons.  We aren't raised above the audience.  We and they can see and hear everything and everyone.  It's simultaneously cool and terrifying.  More on the actual performances tomorrow.