Thought Residencies

Lately we've been doing a lot of talking about Do-ing vs. Be-ing at our house, and, um, trying to just take a - little - LOOK at that, and - the experience of that or our understanding of that at our house and, y'know, we do a lot: I think we are Big Do-ers, over here. Yup, we, uh, do...do do...haha! And uh yeah, and I'd like to do a little bit more Being without worrying about the 'To Do' do that's overdue. And watching my daughter do this really neat art exploration tonight with epsom salts and water and crystal and food colouring and paper towel, just, my head was just goin'..."do be do be do be do be do be do be doooo"

My parents were living and working in New York City when the towers fell. My father watched it with his own eyes and they plucked charred pieces of paper from their Brooklyn balcony for days afterwards. Uh, that same day my husband was on a train with a group of children to perform at an international children's peace festival, but they had to stop the train at the border and bus the kids back, finding a way to explain to them why the peace festival was cancelled. Uh, he wasn't my husband at the time, but today is our fifteenth wedding anniversary. When we called my parents to ask them if we could, ah, use that date for the ceremony and we explained that it was the only day my paternal grandfather could attend, they said that they were ok with that, that they wanted to fill that day with love, with a loving memory. That paternal grandfather is now passed away as has all of my grandparents and. umm... today I am thinking about love and happiness and peace and death and ...all the people who are also thinking about love and happiness and peace and death on this date.

I'm sitting on the third floor watching a really powerful thunderstorm sweep through the rooftops around me and I am realizing that I am sitting in the sky, i am literally sitting inside the sky. My whole life I've lived on first floors and basements of Ontario homes and buildings and, sitting up here in the sky in the middle of a storm, I'm thinking about my friend Liisa Repo-Martell and all the incredible artists who came together to start Artists for Real Climate Action (ARCA) that launched a huge social Media campaign today to gather members, and at last check I think we got over twelve hundred members, in one day, and I'm just sitting inside the sky thinking about how great that is and how grateful I am.

I've been thinking about the public in the private and the private in the public which is so much of the territory that I have to live in as an actress, and I just came in from the West Toronto Railpath that runs along my home - because I'm trying to get outside more before the snow flies for walks or jogs, and I was just listening to the Guilty Feminist Podcast about abortion rights in Northern Ireland and it wasn't until after I returned to the house that I realised I had probably: doubled over in laughter; shouted the word "YES!" three or four times in solidarity; clapped my hand over my mouth in amazement - completely oblivious ah, to any observers that might be passing me on the railpath and how interesting that these personal entertainment devices, that used to be about listening to the radio privately in your own home or your car or your place of work, now are portable and can go out and roam around the world.

This morning I woke up in Toronto and tonight I will go to sleep in Toronto,

So a guy on the highway got really angry with me because I couldn't, wouldn't, let him into the lane if his choosing at the time of his choosing and so he angrily swerved around me and got in front of me and then slammed on his brakes forcing me to slam on my brakes, very dangerously, all to teach me some sort of lesson and then a full five minutes later when he was exiting the freeway he rolled down his window and gave me the finger, and it just got me thinking about emotional energy and how we expend it and choose to expend it or how it expends itself through us and it also made me realize that I didn't have a terribly big emotional reaction to him, which is also uncommon because I used to kinda have road rage and frustration with people and that I wasn't feeling that and I think it was because I just completed a day of dramaturgy and dramaturgy is really really hard and then I started to think about maybe that's where all of my emotional energy is going to these days is into the work and is that a good thing or a bad thing it's certainly leveling out the spikes of emotion good or bad in my day to day living, and…yeah. Emotional energy. And theatre. And road rage.

Today I am thinking about Larry Dohey. I woke up this morning and checked Facebook as I am wont to do, and saw that Larry passed away suddenly yesterday. Larry was an archivist, but a bit of a celebrity at least within in our community, the creative community in Newfoundland and Labrador. He worked at the archives of the Basilica, the Roman Catholic Diocese for many years, and then at the Rooms provincial archives, and he was an endless resource to so many people in our community on so many fronts, and watching the reaction to his passing this morning on social media is just kind of a testament to the effect that a person can have even in jobs that sometimes quietly go unnoticed such as an archivist. Larry kind of elevated – I'll use that word – elevated the importance and the public impact of a position like that. And yeah, so I'm sad, and I'm reflective, and I'm thinking of Larry, and I'm grateful to have known him, and I'm grateful to have been touched by his brilliance a bit. And I'm thinking about community, and I'm thinking about impact, and I'm thinking about…all kinds of things.

Today I am in Avondale Newfoundland, in a beautiful little house overlooking the bay, working with Evalyn and Leah on The Dialysis Project in the capacity of a dramaturge, key collaborator. And so I'm thinking about coming to other people's work, other people's stories, and how to bring what I do to those stories in an attempt to elevate them without intruding upon them, and how to honour trauma and complexity in people's stories without dramaturgically simplifying them or erasing them or any of the other things that too heavy a hand could do. And also thinking about how every project is a completely new learning experience even after all of these years.

I'm just about to hop in a car and drive three hours from St John's to the Bonavista peninsula to take in the second instalment of the Bonavista Biennale, a project that started back in 2017 and it's having its second iteration this year. An incredible, ambitious, beautiful art site-seeing tour across the Bonavista peninsula, where you dip into these little buildings, and some not so little, along that road that I've driven many many times in my life but I've never noticed these buildings before, and now you walk in and there's magical...almost as if by magic there are these incredible art displays. It's an incredible way to encounter some fantastic contemporary visual art while at the same time getting to know an area intimately, and it's my new favourite thing in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. So I'm thinking a lot about vision and ambition and thinking outside the box and ways of transforming space and that's what I'm thinking about today.