Some of you know that for the past 8 months I have been deep diving into drama therapy techniques and learning more about the historical events surrounding my immediate family history and that I am preparing to do a solo performance show in San Francisco on October 21. Part of that process involves the not-at-all small miracle of gathering actual human bodies and souls together in a room, for hours at a time, showing and telling our stories. The stories we don’t want to have to tell, but the ones we also must tell. The stories whose need to be told is persistent and burning, no matter how many layers of outer life we have loaded on to avoid telling them.
.
Last night I witnessed a story that reminded me why it is essential, not recreational, for me to make art. The story reminded me of what it’s like to grow up being told what to feel, not being asked or invited to feel what I feel, constantly in an unspoken environment of assumed compliance. The story reminded me of what it’s like to be an adult who carries the secret pain of that childhood inside every day. The kind of adult who makes huge wall-sized paintings of her pain, but keeps them only in her locked bedroom, full of shame that her paintings are not Van Gogh enough to be shown anywhere more public than that. The kind of adult who long ago abandoned, or more accurately dismissed, her own desire and dream of being a dancer, out of the same assumed compliance that she had been accustomed to.
.
The story reminded me that I also sometimes hide my best work - which is to say my most honest and spontaneously joyful work. I sometimes hide it in the pages of sketchbooks which are piled high as towers, waiting for no one to see them ever. I believe sometimes that this is the only space my private joy, my deepest most honest joy, deserves.
.
The story reminded me that I must make art - and share my art- as a practice in taking up space, in not being asked but rather offering my feelings in the world. Sharing my art is a sometimes scary practice in asking that others see what I feel, and risking the receiving of their response. Mostly it is the risking of my own response to being seen as I see myself.
