That City : Rehearsal Feed

Notes on Brexit

Originally published on Facebook and Instagram, 31 January 2020 photo: Paul Wade I never felt at home in the United States, where I was born and grew up. I felt at home in my parents’ house, when I danced or skated, at university and in Philadelphia’s theatre community, but never fully in the culture at large. My sense of humour didn’t work there. People often didn’t “get” me. They asked me what was wrong a lot. When I was a child, I used to sit in the park not far from my par ents’ house and face East, as if through regular performance of this ritual, I could will myself across the ocean, to Europe, where I had never been. When I first lived in a European country - the Czech Republic in 2005/2006 - I experienced a transformation in my wellbeing and sense of self. I began to dismantle the toxic association of a person’s wealth with their intrinsic value as a human being. I learned delayed gratification. I felt sexier than I ever had in the United States. I made dear friends w

notes to self: a glossary for what i do

So it's a season of - among other things - digging through piles of digital detritus in search of old workshop plans. I hate doing this kind of thing. I do almost anything to avoid it. I do this because as long as I don't actually look into my archives, I can delude myself into thinking that they exist. There is something perversely paradoxical in my seeming inability to organise things properly. It's enough to think 'this is quite good, I should make sure to keep it' and then all hope of actually doing so is gone. I don't know how to ratify my allergy to proper record keeping with a simultaneous and contradictory need to assert my presence on the world. That's a big tug and pull for me. I want to leave foot prints, so long as my feet aren't artificially weighed down. I want to wear a groove, but only the kind that allows for divergence. So yeah. Whatever that's about, my (lack of) record-keeping is a physical manifestation of it. Happily, th

Because we don't work in a vacuum.

by Becka McFadden So this blog is about performance and perhaps this is a semi-hijack. Though perhaps not. Once, not so very long ago, I did a PhD grounded in the sociology of theatre and performance. The fundamental premise of this school of thought - unsurprisingly - is that what we do on stage is not distinct from what is happening in the world. Making art, we both respond to and co-create the social world in which we continue to live, love, vote, pay taxes and make more art. A brief anecdote by way of illustration. During the dark days (though how comparatively luminous they seem in retrospect!) of George W. Bush's run for re-election, I was doing my MA in Theatre. Our programme was organised such that you could hold an almost fulltime-time job and still do it, as a result of which our classes started around 4:30 and rehearsals often continued past midnight. The night of the election coincided with a significant rehearsal of a political twentieth century European play that

Beautifully Confused

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