Rearranging the Furniture Development Process
Early Versions
I began toying with some of the ideas in “Rearranging the Furniture” at La MaMa Umbria 4 months after receiving my diagnosis of retinitis pigmentosa. As you might imagine, my early explorations came from a place of a fair amount of fear and feelings of loss. Although I continue to have these feelings at times, I have also found a lot of joy, reinvigoration, and excitement for what lies ahead. I hesitate to put these videos out there lest you find them too macabre or navel-gazey…but I like documenting process and these were steps along the way.
Video created and performed at La MaMa Umbria International Directors’ Symposium in June 2017 during a workshop taught by Andrea Adriatico.
Monologue created and performed at Pig Iron’s Something from Nothing Workshop in January 2018.
Early in 2018, Dr. Tessa Carr convinced me to apply to be on a performative panel with her for the American Society for Theatre Research conference in San Diego. My original abstract was for a performance entitled “Fumbling around in the Dark” and stated that:
I’m haunted by Oedipus. Or perhaps it makes more sense to say I’m haunted by Tiresias – aroused in college by the lesson that sight is less valuable than insight, though the latter without the former led to dependency, banishment, and isolation. Impotent in his blindness, Tiresias can do nothing other than speak the truth and earn the disdain of those who ask him for it. A recent diagnosis of retinitis pigmentosa has made me a director who stands “visionary” at the edge of my vision. A lifetime of crafting images from the dark and teaching others how to paint evocative stage pictures appears to have left me without insight. I scour textbooks for answers to the question of how one directs without sight – but either those words aren’t there or they’ve scurried out of eye’s range.
This performance art piece wonders: Why is darkness full of fear?
Once the panel was accepted, I had to write something. After stumbling across a blind joke, I retitled the piece with the punchline of the joke: Rearrange the furniture. Although the piece maintained some of the key elements present in the abstract (Tiresias, the challenge of creating theatre without sight, primary among them) it quickly morphed from despairing into a call to action from my peer theatre practitioners.
The piece premiered on November 15, 2018 at UC Irvine before going on to ASTR Forum the next day.
After these performances, I began to rework the text for a performance for a general audience as part of the 2019 Arts Experience at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, a two week celebration of inclusion in the arts. I learned a lot from this performance and was excited to have the chance to take those lessons and further refine the piece before taking it to PortFringe (Portland, Maine), where it would be framed within a larger performance Fringe festival. My main edits to the piece at this point had to do with with ensuring that I hit tight time limits and finding ways to engage the audience in embodied creativity that utilizes senses beyond sight.
In June 2019, I was delighted to participate Indy Convergence, where I further investigated ways to engage the audience in an experience of creative exploration and heightened awareness of our interdependency. I’ve written a bit more of that process here. Retirement of Rearranging the Furniture
I embarked upon a sabbatical during calendar year 2020 with a scheduled month-long residency during which we were going to explore ways to make “Rearranging the Furniture” more interactive and tactile. The residency was to take place in April 2020. In March, everything shut down due to Covid. Needless to say, a pandemic that requires people stay more than 6 feet apart and not touch each other made my goals of exploring how to physically tether audience members to each other and to me impossible.
As a result, I turned my attention to exploring the elements of the story that are well served through online media such as livestreaming and film. Whereas I thought I was interested in moving as far away from putting audience members in my shoes as possible - recognizing the real dangers of disability simulations and the limits of empathy - I wound up using cameras to more fully immerse audiences in my experience while denying them the ability of monitoring my responses to the experience for cues as to how they should respond.