Da Show

Okay, finally. People have asked how I feel about it, how I feel after it, what the night was like for me. I’ve needed 4 days for my reactions to settle in my head and body, and to digest the feedback received.

The first word I’d use to describe it is “watershed”. Kenny and Ruth confirmed it at breakfast the next morning, when they told me my work is in a different place now. On a whole new playing field. I have a sense of ‘before’ and ‘after’ about the show. Before I didn’t know, wasn’t certain, about theater being the right medium, about my capacities within theater, about the sheer extraordinary amount of work it took to produce and perform a show. After, I know. I trust my own knowledge about the work over anyone else’s opinion or judgment. I trust the sense of purpose and gut level conviction about continuing, whatever doors open or close, whatever works or doesn’t, whatever new ways come up to do it, whatever skills I have to master.

The next word is “learning”. I was learning until the moment I got home, at 1am, and began to take off my makeup. The entire show was an experience of having new elements tossed at me and catching or dropping them. From the lav mic taped to my body, which I worked with for the first time that night, to the hanging line for the saris, which we decided to do only the day before (until then, each sari went back into the suitcase), to walking into a shop on College Avenue that morning, saying “I’m doing a theater show tonight - I need makeup for stage lights and camera and I don’t have a clue where to start.” To realizing that if I cry on stage, I need tissues handy so I can blow my nose before the next piece.

There was the technical stuff – the mic cutting out (our best guess is that one of the wires came loose from the battery pack tucked down my waistband), the flat theater floor which made it hard for those in the middle and back rows to see me when I was sitting or lying down on stage. I’m sorry!!

There was the incredible unexpected rightness of how it felt to have the whole stage to move on. Despite how much I have to learn about stage movement, voice, acting; despite how much of my mind was on each thing I missed or fudged when I was up there; I felt so much of the work’s own intrinsic power, life, grief, joy, during its 35 minutes. I could have run it again, 3 or 4 times that night, on pure exhilaration, getting better and better each time. Rennie Harris said to me afterwards: “If you could do it, back to back, several nights in a row, you would really be in the space.”

So many moments still zing through my bloodstream:

∑ Peering out through the hole in the door into the theater and seeing the faces of friends and family in the audience. Thinking “My people are in the house” and doing a little crazy dance.

∑ The musicians – Irma, Mamuka, Robert, Vivek. The largeness of heart and endless generosity of talent, sharing, commitment they brought to the evening.

* Kenny and Ruth, driving in from Merced, showing up 200%, keeping the whole fundraising piece covered.

* All the volunteers: Shireen, Philip, my housemate Diana, holding it down so I didn't have to think about it.

∑ Sarah Crowell, my choreographer, making me laugh, taking me through warm-ups, telling me “we don’t see enough of your ass on stage……” when I panicked that the mic pack would drag my trousers down during the show.

* David (lighting designer) and Riley (set designer), the miracle men, solidly there from 10am until 11pm, utterly present and focused, solving every problem with skill and humor and ease. A living example of the commitment to craft that I aspire to.

* Kim (my director) saying to me in the dressing room, in the moments of pre-show tension: “You have it. All the rehearsing, learning, technique, has been so that you can go out there and let them fall away. Just let what you have come through.”

∑ How hard it was to come out of the grief at the end of the women’s testimonies in the Mau Mau piece. As if my body had dissolved and reformed around the red bundle of knots (the dead babies) and separating it would be violent surgery.

* Somersaulting in the Sister / Cape dance. I’d agreed, reluctantly, to cut that somersault out in tech rehearsal earlier that day – for the mic pack at the back of my waist. But it happened before I could stop it – thankfully it didn’t kill the mic

∑ Touching the saris on the hanging line when I walked off at the end of Sister / Cape. Each was living tissue reaching out to me. It was saying goodbye to my sisters, promising never to forget, promising to honor their histories.

* Shireen tossing roses at us on stage. So lovely and joyous and purely Shireen. Then challenging me on romanticizing Indian weavers in the Q and A.

∑ Kim, in the Q and A, describing what the 90-minute show will be, and the guiding ethos behind it. I’m so immersed in the specifics right now, I lose sight of the big picture. Each time I realize that she’s holding it, keeping us on course for the whole vision, not just the current stage, I’m filled with gratitude.

∑ Rodney, in his Q and A, saying “I’ll do whatever I have to do to dance – even if it means becoming an actor.”

∑ Sitting in the restaurant afterwards, with Rennie, Kim, and Rodney, eating fries off each other’s plates, zapping talk back and forth. Kim said to Rennie, “Shailja keeps asking me Why theater? Why do I need all this extra cumbersome stuff to do my work? What’s your answer to that?” Rennie talked about his own journey of making dance, and moving it into the theater space, learning what lights, staging, other elements add, learning how to keep the work able to stand on its own without them, but also using what they offer. “Don’t limit your opportunities. Give yourself as many ways to do your work as you can.”

∑ Coming home to a poem of praise in my in-box, rich with the detail of deep attention and genuine opening to the work on stage. Another kind of rose, tossed through cyberspace.