lightning

That is not a metaphor. It is crashing so loudly and so brightly, it feels very near.
I am such a lucky girl this week and I have so much to process.
It was the first week of the Lincoln Center Director's Lab, the opening of One Child Born: The Music of Laura Nyro by Kate Ferber and Louis Greenstein, (that I am directing), and casting is set for Three Days of Rain (also directing, goes up in Texas in September). I also got to see my mom and my cousin Katie.
The Lab is a recipe for incredulity. This week alone we talked with:

Kate Whoriskey
Declan Donellan
Lev Dodin
Winter Miller
& Mark Bennett and numerous musical-theater peeps (composer, lyricists, etc.)

and did:
a 3-day 'moment workshop' with Andy Paris (Tectonic Theater Project)
some strenuous physical work with a Grotowski practitioner
movement work (and psycho-drama!) evoking MAAFA (or, Middle Passage) with Jesse Wooden, Jr. and his company Meyerhold's Biomechanics with a theater company that uses his principles and etudes in the conception and execution of their work

I missed Ntozake Shange's talk because of my callbacks... but I doubt if I would have been capable of taking in and synthesizing much more stimulation.

All this movement work and discussing it in terms of its groundbreaking-ness has me feeling very appreciative of my coming to theater through dance, and slightly anti-hero-worshipful of some of the people who gave existing quantities clever, intellectual names. Many of the big ideas are intrinsic for dancers/choreographers-- and it is fascinating to me how many of my directing peers in the Lab seem to revere artists like Pina Bausch-- while going about their craft in a completely different way. I used to talk with my friend Sam about how being a choreographer is quite like being a director, only it is harder-- because you are also the playwright. I don't think he agreed with that. But then, at that point I was a choreographer and he was a director and we are so often protective of that thing we do, aren't we?

I walked around DUMBO this afternoon too and had to keep pushing the bitter feelings down and away. This place that has had such a formative effect on me-- and I once thought I was making an impact on it-- has no memory of me. No trace. There's a bigger and better flea market than any DUMBO Bazaar. The first three homes of my fledling Nest are alive and well and seem to be carrying on respectable and legitimate cultural commerce. Then again, the beer still tastes good and the view is still magnificent; for now anyway.
The girl who is living in the apartment I lived in hung a piece of fabric over the glass door to the balcony just like I did. There's a problem there of too much light coming in all at once in the morning and almost blinding you.