a preface to this piece. in august i took a solo performance intensive with the amazing marya sea kaminski who is one of my real life heroes. the class itself deserves its own entry, about how i hit up against failure, how it paralyzed me, how, once i pushed through to the end {blocking myself all along the way} and then let down my guard, ideas flew at me left and right that i could not manifest to save my self or show a mere week or two before.
despite the discomfort, it was a success. i wanted to learn more about constructing solo work, have tools to store in my back pocket {check}. i wanted to generate writing and start to sculpt thoughts around a show/idea/theme {check--see below}. i wanted to get my creative and performance juices flowing as i start ramping up for rehearsals of proof later this fall {check--and had a great moment of reminder about how vulnerable it can get on stage}.
nowhere in my goals starting out did i set out to make and complete a perfect piece, but somehow i tripped myself up trying to do so. but before failure snuck out of its locked box and tripped me up, i had a pretty awesome experience working through what anne lamont calls the shitty first draft. the below is version 1.8 of the shitty first draft of free writing and pretty much a piece on its own. it marks this amazing opportunity that is currently on hold while i put together a production this fall as well as {significantly} explore the theme of home and what it means to me now as an adult by living the life of a nomad. my current life is a lovely companion piece to the below. love how life works that way.
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a week ago, a facebook friend messaged me late at night. and when i say friend, i mean he’s more of an acquaintance, the older brother of a classmate in college. a good guy, really, but no one i’ve ever spilled my guts to or gone out of my way to spend time with. no, more just someone i’ll laugh with when i travel to see his sister, a passing friend who’s “sunset a day” photo series i’ve been admiring from afar all year via said facebook.
we all have these kinds of friends, collecting them in mass quantities, shuffling through their updates about what boring thing they ate, what boring thing their dog or baby or friend’s friend did, whining about how boring it is yet doing it compulsively all the same. it’s inane, i know, but the only reason i subscribe to this use of technology is because of photographic works like this "friend", andrew, has been displaying all year, but even more so for the magical moments of connection like the one i’m going to tell you about. it was the kind of magic where a simple late night question “are you back in seattle yet?” lead, in less than 5 minutes, through a series of the twists and turns of meandering late night conversation, to the confession of a driving desire on my part to go down to alabama to create a piece about memory, family history, time and place.
and then, the critical moment happened when this man, this person i can count on one hand how many times i’ve hung out with, offers to come and document the project. and then, when i ask if he’ll help me make the short film i didn’t really realize i had been trying to figure out to make until just that moment, he even manages to get excited about it even more. giddy. the two of us typing away enthusiastically into the wee hours of the morning, andrew completely unaware of the emotional breakdown i had earlier that evening watching the last harry potter movie {sappy but true}, seeing the entire magical community mobilize behind one person, tears streaming down my face realizing that i want that experience of people believing in me so much they would die for me, then simultaneously realizing in the flash of an epiphany that i crave that belief from others because, dammit, I don’t believe in myself! and then fastforward back to the present moment, me at a keyboard, a mere hour or two later, being given the gift of this one person’s belief and commitment and oh-my-gosh-i-don’t-think-i-can-sleep kind of excitement in me and my project and my vision.
after waiting 18 years to return to my childhood home and 6 years to make a piece of artwork about it, everything is happening and happening with the ease that synchronicity brings {that’s not going to be a problem, nathania, i have all the equipment i need sitting 5 feet from my body}.
so here i stand, suddenly at the precipice, looking forward to this place i have been looking back to for so long. and let me tell you, it’s a scary precipice. because all that longing, all that patina of loving polish and care i have added to all the memories i have maintained over the years, all those things i cared for and have contemplated for many years that may no longer exist, or even worse, exist still but so changed as to feel defiled--all those things might be taken away, violated or not as i recall them to be.
and as the time and space between me and bayou la batre, alabama compresses, gets smaller, the anticipation is often overwhelming and i feel the pressure building, the hope and memory and excitement and inevitable disappointment already converging until all i can do is breathe. breathe. breathe.
breathe space and air and light and life into the memories i do have, take them out and look at them one by one before having them irrevocably changed by the reality of what these places look like now. because 18 years in geographic time has passed, where a town was built up by the tourism surrounding the placement of bubba gump shrimp company smack dab in the center of town {even though it wasn't actually filmed there}, bringing interest and wealth to a town that probably deserved neither, to the violence of katrina who ravaged more than just new orleans, and especially to the uncontrollable yet gentler forces of time and change.
and on top of all that there is 18 years of personal time, of me growing up, becoming an adult, seeing and feeling the world from 3 feet taller and decades older all the while hording the memories i had of this sleepy little town in the south that inhabited me more than i inhabited it as a 3rd culture kid, never speaking the southern language of mooobeal {mobile} and the bi-youuu {bayou}, never eating the southern diet of everything fried in two inches of bacon fat and never really understanding the southern mentality of “traveling a ways” meaning going to the next zipcode.
but the south, it has always lived in me in ways i can’t fully understand even as an adult. maybe because it was the most reliable way of feeling beauty and connection from within a family with three older siblings who would really rather not have anything to do with their littlest sister, a mother too spaced out to mediate and a father too imbalanced, fighting the world, fighting his wife, fighting his children and most of all fighting himself, where i was perpetually submerged in that feeling of loneliness that was more of a chronic disease than a passing emotion. the kind of loneliness that comes from feeling so small and separate in such a big world. a feeling i find kind of ironic since as an adult woman i can’t seem to get over how big I am.
so where could i turn to but the south? the spanish moss laden trees passing by outside the open window of our car, the yellow wash of light soaking the faded fabric of our living room, the louvers of the windows that we would hastily close each night the bug sprayers would sweep through the area, the pungent yet sweet and horribly toxic smell they would leave behind that i would drink in to saturate my vivid childhood senses. the jeweled crimson of magnolia seeds. the gentle chime of the draw bridge being brought back up that i would strain to catch the first sign of each time--these images sink deeper into the spirit than i fully know how to go, pumped with life by the thready pulse of my memory that so lovingly crafts the experience each time i draw them up and back into me. and it worries me that i have instilled in myself a confidence in my memory, not for the methodic memorization of numbers and words, though i’m not all too shabby at that, but for that visual and sense memory, of knowing a place i have been to only once and years ago at that.
what if i go now and it is not how i remembered it not because it’s changed, but because my memory failed?
so i ask myself now: how do i let go of what i know or think i know? how do i come to this place open hearted and free? because whether or not i want to, i come burdened with an abundance of nostalgia. but not the sweet kind of nostalgia, cloying and untrue, no, this is not the saccharine variety but rather the sacrificial. the kind of nostalgia that churns up dark waters, where everything that has been lost or taken or forgotten washes up in its wake to be burned as an offering for all that is to come. because as much as i go down there for the past, for what was and what has been, to honor and name it, present it in vivid colors, i am here to discover what it holds for the future, to see how it lives on in my life as it is happening right now and how that will all grace what is to come.
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