May Archive Highlight - "For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow"

For this month, in celebrating my unlikely and very fortuitous acceptance into the 6-Month 2024 FORGE Fellowship, I thought it might be interesting to give you all a sneak-peak at the other side of an announcement like this: the application process of any Fellowship, Grant, or other Open Call involves a good deal of content creation, and FORGE in particular created a set of questions that demanded some pretty heavy introspection. As it turns out, that kind of reflection is something I’ve been hungry for, and something that my standard operating procedures did not afford. I’ve mashed together some of the writing from my application with some reflecting that FORGE had me do upon acceptance, and am throwing the results below to give a little insight into how I’m hoping these next 6 months can be a turning point for my practice (and as a tangential result, a turning point for the content of this Patreon).

What are you hungry to learn?

“God, grant me the tools to finish the production tasks I can’t outsource, the communication to outsource the ones I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

For the past 4 years, I’ve been self-producing most of my own opportunities and then trying to seize them to the fullest. Increasingly, I’ve found that my current means of doing so leaves me too tired to do either as well as I’d like.

Fundamentally, I need to get strategic about what work is best done by me and what work I need to find a way to do in collaboration. For about a year and change, I feel like I’ve had to center myself as a producer, and I haven’t been able to focus on the thing I draw the most energy and fulfillment from - being a performer. I believe if I can create more energy-efficiency for the former, I’ll be able to recharge more successfully from the latter (while reinvesting in raising the quality of my performance work), and ultimately can pursue more ambitious and exciting projects. I am very proud of what I’ve been able to accomplish at a small scale, and I have an interest in developing those experiments further, and making the production models I’ve explored more established and accessible to others (my efforts in the Cannonball “Snack Track” being the most recent and prominent example). At the same time, I find myself at times unsure what elements of the “scrappy micro-scale” are inherent to my aesthetic and principles, and which were created in response to scarcity, and thus could be relaxed or even released.

How do you hope a FORGE Fellowship will impact your work, life, and process?

I hope to be capable of producing my work and projects with both ambition and joy. Perhaps to even be ambitiously joyful, and to take joy in the scope of my ambitions.  

I envision shaping the ways I operate/exist as a producer (and in begrudging contact with capitalism) to better reflect the ideals and values I create and fight for in my performances. At the same time, I also want to be a better advocate for myself. I believe deeply in the power and value of the work I have been making. Yet as I have carved out my particular niche in the market and creative ecosystem, I have often found myself struggling to describe what it is I do, let alone to share it with confidence or communicate its worth. I'm inclined to depend on direct experience and word of mouth to turn others into advocates for my work. I hope the FORGE Fellowship can put me on the path to being one of those people who speaks with enthusiasm and conviction about the body of work I’m creating.

For a long time, I had a “put your head down and grind” mentality about creating, and I was grateful to have the chance to just put in as many shows as I was physically capable of. Without a doubt, there have been benefits to this - I am devout believer in "reps," and in the power of getting your hours in. In the past 4 years alone, I've been able to log over 2000 hours of performing my own work (plus a smattering of other people's projects). I know that I am a "clutch performer," operating at a higher standard and getting more out of myself in the presence of audience members. Having this high density of working time has given me the chance to grow and sharpen my skills, and for the very particular style of performance that I do, I sincerely feel I've consistently gotten stronger year over year. However, at the same time, at the base of this glut of performances is an enormous amount of exertion—and beneath that is an unexamined belief that effort can be converted into worth, (and that I need to strive for a baseline of worth to justify the space I occupy). These past few years I’ve been trying to be more intentional about the values and intentions I reflect in my process, and to be open to reconsidering what makes “Good Art”—or for that matter, a “Good Artist.” One of the biggest shifts I’ve been seeking in that process is trying to be more intentional about creating and thinking in community, as opposed to always as a solitary practice. 

In 2024, after a few years of talking with other immersive creators about the challenges and opportunities for touring small and unconventional performances, I have begun a series of experiments trying to self-produce my in-person shows in multiple cities as "tours." The hope is that this will help gather information and test assumptions, letting me share learnings with other creators and even coordinate with multiple production teams to build shared tours of small works.

In the absence of a clear path of how my work can “grow,” exploring these possibilities feels like the best way to challenge both myself and the limits of the format of small-audience performance. It also may be a chance to create space for other theatermakers, performers and designers to expand and develop their own work and ideas.

If nothing else, it’s definitely enough to keep me busy for 6 months.