After nearly a month living in northwestern Poland with the Touchstone Theatre ensemble, working at/for/with an international theatre festival, I’ve had a few thoughts.
- Pierogies are hard to make.
- The Polish people are generous, thoughtful, kind, and willing to help with anything.
- There are madly talented people all over the world.
- I’m starting to allow myself to believe that I do know what I’m doing, maybe, after all.
- There are many, many cats in Goleniów.
- I like borscht.
- Despite all of the amazingly talented and creative people I met, my favorite folk to work with were a group of young adults from a half-way house in a near-by village. Their honestly, vulnerability, and willingness to trust us was astonishing. The art they ended up helping create and perform moved the audience to tears, laughter, and a huge dance-party. The best!
- You can find gelato anywhere.
- I went unsure of what I would discover, and a little scared: I was about to perform a piece of theatre dealing with rising authoritarianism and dictatorship in a country faced with it.
- I ended up performing that production, creating a new theatre piece about overcoming monsters, and re-writing a fable I’ve told for years about freedom. I realize now that everything I was doing was, in the end, about singing a redemption song.
- Pierogies are delicious to eat.
- Working 14 hour days, ad nauseam can wear a person out.
- The cute Polish name I was bestowed by a delightful group of local folk-dancers, and that I delightedly used to introduce myself, has a slang meaning that made everyone smile.
- I ate too much.
- Did I mention I like borscht?
- There is something remarkably powerful about gathering
a group of people from all around the world, giving them a platform to express themselves, and despite the variety of performance styles or experience, there was a unifying message: we are one, and the thing that binds us all together is love.
