Flying in the Dark

Flying in the dark is what we were all doing when Jennifer and I started intensive work with Kim on her new 2wp show.  We all of us knew there was good material in the script a-plenty but we also all knew it wasn’t coming together in quite the right way.

The work Jennifer and I do is exploratory.  Yes, I’m good at finding plot lines and building dramatic arcs but we believe that often there are preliminaries in terms of opening doors through voice and movement to emotional variety and depth.

Truth to tell, Kim is one of the most positive people in the world.  She lives with joy and relish and finds humour in much that would otherwise be dark.  All that was there.  It was there in abundance but something was missing.

We got her to shout, a clarion call of commitment to who she is.  We then suggested she try an exercise we’ve found to be among the most powerful in what we have to offer.  It has to do with claiming, with saying, “I am…” and then letting whatever words rise to the lips come out.

In this case, the task was “I am blindness.”  We were all of us surprised at the result.  We were even more surprised when Jennifer asked Kim to breathe, speak one word about the experience, breathe and speak again.  What came first to this oh, so positive person was “tightrope;” hot on its heels was “display.”

More work followed as Kim took on some of the characters in her story – characters who had come to be mere symbols for her but now emerged as three dimensional beings with full lives.  The experience was rich but, of course, also hugely disturbing.  Apart from anything else we had to physically explore why tightrope?  Why this image Kim has never “seen?”

As I drove Kim home, I knew she was exhausted.  The next day she emailed us to say she had a  sense that things were moving within.  What she didn’t tell us until later was that anger was emerging -- anger at what she has had to face in her life in ways sighted people don’t have to; anger at the dis-abling manner in which she is so often treated in the sighted world.  Anger and then groundedness: a more fulfilled awareness of what she has so vibrantly achieved.

This story isn’t over.  We’re still not quite sure where the script will go.  We just know Kim is writing to us with a muscle-y clarity that will make her performance leap into life as none of us has quite anticipated; a clarity that will allow her to evoke and make vivid the tale that, from the beginning, has been hers to tell.  And yes, of course, there will be laughter – in truth she seems to be laughing even more.