[ __ ]
My project began with two big questions. The first was about process; how could I use performance as a tool for research and creation? I’m good at performing; I respond well to deadlines, understand better when I’m forced to share my thoughts with others, and as an actor, only truly surprise myself in performance. Something about the presence of other actors and audience members is vital for me; I feel safe giving up some of my control to them. I’m also good at conceptualizing, as one of the side effects of being prone to over-thinking is constantly generating ideas. But I get stuck in the research and development phase; it never inspired me. I pushed myself to create time for my ideas to develop and be tested, but I couldn’t find an exciting means of analyzing or organizing my thoughts and materials. When a deadline would bang on my door, I’d respond as a performer: I’d make choices, make cuts, and make it happen. But I always felt I had missed the chance to thoughtfully explore my topic and content. I wondered if I could improve my process by borrowing elements from the most exciting part of my process and using performance as research – not merely as the end result.
My second question was about how my work could listen and speak to specific audiences. Returning to Abu Dhabi after spending a year abroad, I wanted to be useful as an artist in this community. Abroad, my impression was that theater was performed mostly for other theater people. There was a moving and impactful exchange between the artists onstage and the artists in the audience, but I could also see that this conversation was often inaccessible to those outside of the theater community, and accessible work was often dismissed by theater makers I spoke to as “merely entertainment.”
In Abu Dhabi there is not much theater, and most of what I had seen seemed to me to be experienced by audiences as “entertainment.” But in my two years at NYUAD in Abu Dhabi, I felt I made work that responded to my university community, and I had seen how work performed for people and not just at them brought a different kind of engagement. I was able to use my work to start rich and complicated discussions with my classmates, or to create a space for others to open up emotionally and be vulnerable. This kind of sharing was hard to come by in the university, and rarer still in the city, where interactions in public spaces are often limited by a variety of dividing lines, such as language, economic class, and nationality. I wanted to create this same space on a broader scale, to make thought provoking work specific to my surroundings that would help people here reexamine and reflect on their experience in this shared place.
Enter RUBÉN POLENDO. Mentor. Theater Maker. Artistic Director of Theater Mitu, and professor of a number of chronically over-enrolled classes that are prone to inspiring existential crisis. Has known Yannick for four years now, and is generous enough to have remained suspicious of him.
Enter DEBRA LEVINE. Mentor. Director. Researcher. Startlingly precise and terrifyingly thoughtful, and articulate to a degree that may be illegal. Has known Yannick for only this one year, but already knows far too much.
In conversations with my mentors, they were quick to point out that my second line of questioning was problematic: “What constitutes ‘help?’ ” “Who am I to give it, or say where it is given?” Furthermore, ideas of giving back to the city or community of Abu Dhabi were similarly fraught: ‘is there one single community of Abu Dhabi?’ ‘‘What constitutes this city?’ ‘How can I create any working understanding of this city that is not reductive?’ To move the project forward, they recommended that I narrow down my focus to find a single, resonant aspect of my experience within Abu Dhabi (for now, understood only geographically).
I locked myself in a room and started free-writing: mind maps and word associations and other such tricks. I made a city of torn out loose-leaf papers on a desk and tried to populate it with my thoughts and anxieties. Fears, desires, choices waiting to be made, and the looming departure at the end of the year, wherein I would leave this university, and perhaps this city, forever. And yet the crisis of departure is nothing new to me, and far less so since I began studying in the UAE. In my four years of being based in Abu Dhabi, I've moved thirteen times through nine cities in seven countries. I’ve lived through many places and people, and never with all of them at once. That was the condition of living in Abu Dhabi and attending this university. Did I miss where I had been? Did I miss those who had shared other spaces with me for a brief period of time? The one condition we all shared was that our relationships were transitory. What were the remnants of all of these transitory moments?
A third question, and a great one at that, both because it gave me a framework for research and because I could feel that within that between space there was something deeply upsetting to me. But it was not a research question I could answer alone, particularly as my personal crisis with ‘missing’ began with the fact that it was not a feeling with which I identified. Was it something I did or an affect – a feeling or doing?
My two earlier questions became productive; I used them to begin a more grounded performance-based engagement that took on the question of missing as content, feeling and action. I set out to create a project composed of three different pieces across two stages; a series of citywide performance actions and a separate audio piece would constitute the research period for a devised theater work.
My hope was not to discover or articulate a single complete definition for missing, but rather to create and explore an ever-growing list of definitions: Missing as an action, a choice, an emptiness, a loss, a reminder of, a remnant, a response to mortality, an open wound and an old scar. Missing would be revealed as a container; something as daily and common as a cloudy day that nevertheless holds within it at of the above and more.
I felt some connection between my new research question and my surroundings. Abu Dhabi is a city of foreigners; almost 9 out of every 10 people here are expatriates. “Guests” come for work, higher wages, a change of place, for safe surroundings, a new lifestyle, and the rare opportunities growing in a rapidly developing city. Just as there was no defined ‘community’ that could describe or include all of these people, there could not be one singular definition of missing that captured or expressed all of their individual experiences.
I still had my desire to engage with the city, but I no longer aspired to ‘bring art’ to a population with a ‘need’ that I presumed. I was the one who needed. My process was no act of benevolence, but rather a request for assistance as I wrestled with what I hoped was a recognizable question. I was not going to simply bring pre-formed work and ideas out into the city. Instead, the project would emerge collaboratively, over time, and as I moved between pieces I would struggle to relinquish absolute control over what shape it would take.
Using three different mediums, I set out on a number of projects throughout Abu Dhabi. While a certain chronological order can be ascribed to them, the truth is not nearly so clean. Timelines collided and overlapped, plans changed on the fly as each project exercised its own autonomy by way of the network of collaborators who brought it to life and ever-present tendency of theory to go swimmingly awry in practice.
My second question was about how my work could listen and speak to specific audiences. Returning to Abu Dhabi after spending a year abroad, I wanted to be useful as an artist in this community. Abroad, my impression was that theater was performed mostly for other theater people. There was a moving and impactful exchange between the artists onstage and the artists in the audience, but I could also see that this conversation was often inaccessible to those outside of the theater community, and accessible work was often dismissed by theater makers I spoke to as “merely entertainment.”
In Abu Dhabi there is not much theater, and most of what I had seen seemed to me to be experienced by audiences as “entertainment.” But in my two years at NYUAD in Abu Dhabi, I felt I made work that responded to my university community, and I had seen how work performed for people and not just at them brought a different kind of engagement. I was able to use my work to start rich and complicated discussions with my classmates, or to create a space for others to open up emotionally and be vulnerable. This kind of sharing was hard to come by in the university, and rarer still in the city, where interactions in public spaces are often limited by a variety of dividing lines, such as language, economic class, and nationality. I wanted to create this same space on a broader scale, to make thought provoking work specific to my surroundings that would help people here reexamine and reflect on their experience in this shared place.
Enter RUBÉN POLENDO. Mentor. Theater Maker. Artistic Director of Theater Mitu, and professor of a number of chronically over-enrolled classes that are prone to inspiring existential crisis. Has known Yannick for four years now, and is generous enough to have remained suspicious of him.
Enter DEBRA LEVINE. Mentor. Director. Researcher. Startlingly precise and terrifyingly thoughtful, and articulate to a degree that may be illegal. Has known Yannick for only this one year, but already knows far too much.
In conversations with my mentors, they were quick to point out that my second line of questioning was problematic: “What constitutes ‘help?’ ” “Who am I to give it, or say where it is given?” Furthermore, ideas of giving back to the city or community of Abu Dhabi were similarly fraught: ‘is there one single community of Abu Dhabi?’ ‘‘What constitutes this city?’ ‘How can I create any working understanding of this city that is not reductive?’ To move the project forward, they recommended that I narrow down my focus to find a single, resonant aspect of my experience within Abu Dhabi (for now, understood only geographically).
I locked myself in a room and started free-writing: mind maps and word associations and other such tricks. I made a city of torn out loose-leaf papers on a desk and tried to populate it with my thoughts and anxieties. Fears, desires, choices waiting to be made, and the looming departure at the end of the year, wherein I would leave this university, and perhaps this city, forever. And yet the crisis of departure is nothing new to me, and far less so since I began studying in the UAE. In my four years of being based in Abu Dhabi, I've moved thirteen times through nine cities in seven countries. I’ve lived through many places and people, and never with all of them at once. That was the condition of living in Abu Dhabi and attending this university. Did I miss where I had been? Did I miss those who had shared other spaces with me for a brief period of time? The one condition we all shared was that our relationships were transitory. What were the remnants of all of these transitory moments?
What does it mean to miss someone? What happens between noticing their absence and feeling it?
A third question, and a great one at that, both because it gave me a framework for research and because I could feel that within that between space there was something deeply upsetting to me. But it was not a research question I could answer alone, particularly as my personal crisis with ‘missing’ began with the fact that it was not a feeling with which I identified. Was it something I did or an affect – a feeling or doing?
My two earlier questions became productive; I used them to begin a more grounded performance-based engagement that took on the question of missing as content, feeling and action. I set out to create a project composed of three different pieces across two stages; a series of citywide performance actions and a separate audio piece would constitute the research period for a devised theater work.
My hope was not to discover or articulate a single complete definition for missing, but rather to create and explore an ever-growing list of definitions: Missing as an action, a choice, an emptiness, a loss, a reminder of, a remnant, a response to mortality, an open wound and an old scar. Missing would be revealed as a container; something as daily and common as a cloudy day that nevertheless holds within it at of the above and more.
I felt some connection between my new research question and my surroundings. Abu Dhabi is a city of foreigners; almost 9 out of every 10 people here are expatriates. “Guests” come for work, higher wages, a change of place, for safe surroundings, a new lifestyle, and the rare opportunities growing in a rapidly developing city. Just as there was no defined ‘community’ that could describe or include all of these people, there could not be one singular definition of missing that captured or expressed all of their individual experiences.
I still had my desire to engage with the city, but I no longer aspired to ‘bring art’ to a population with a ‘need’ that I presumed. I was the one who needed. My process was no act of benevolence, but rather a request for assistance as I wrestled with what I hoped was a recognizable question. I was not going to simply bring pre-formed work and ideas out into the city. Instead, the project would emerge collaboratively, over time, and as I moved between pieces I would struggle to relinquish absolute control over what shape it would take.
Using three different mediums, I set out on a number of projects throughout Abu Dhabi. While a certain chronological order can be ascribed to them, the truth is not nearly so clean. Timelines collided and overlapped, plans changed on the fly as each project exercised its own autonomy by way of the network of collaborators who brought it to life and ever-present tendency of theory to go swimmingly awry in practice.
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