On writing in and of rehearsal

To make work is a slow building, a building that is simultaneously design (there are few blueprints) - and it's cumulative, but not in a tower way, but in the way we accumulate things for our house over the years.

This imperfect metaphor (mangled from Jonathan Burrows and Lorraine Daston) is then hard to write about.

It is messy, half unpacked - there are starting places but no known goal, no known outcome towards which to write - no end that can be used to organize a sequence.
All of which is right, since it is the way we all experience making the work. Writing should not be outside of that.

It is not magic or unspeakable, but it does contain so much unknown, so much fragility and not-yet-articulatable.

But now, as we move closer to performance, I begin to write in rehearsal. As the work is formed I am able to form sentences around it. Ideas come back over and over and language forms around them.

I'll be posting more of those snippets over the next 2 weeks.


Rest