It was really hard to get myself to start working this morning.

I woke to a Facebook newsfeed of arguments about gun control, rebukes of Donald Trump’s ongoing islamophobic statements, posts crossing out #PrayforOrlando in favor of #PolicyChangeforOrlando, members of the LBGTQ community expressing personal fear and outrage, and on and on. Even posts on the positive end – plans for candlelight vigils around the country and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s powerful sonnet at the Tony’s – just served as reminders of what happened this weekend in Orlando, of the deadliest mass shooting in American history.

Often, I can convince myself that the best thing to do after such events is to keep living my life, to not let fear or anger or sorrow prevent me from that. But today it was hard. Today it felt like a day spent revising a grant, drafting residency documentation, confirming conference travel plans, and researching game mechanics, was pretty meaningless: who am I kidding, arguing for the importance of art when there are people being shot and killed senselessly at a place of joy and community and celebration?

Then I remembered something: I’ve had this conversation before. Back in December, the San Bernardino shooting happened halfway through a Cross Pollination residency with Adrienne, Mark Lord, and Shelley Spector. The next morning, they spent a long time talking about how unimportant some of their explorations suddenly felt in the face of the way the world was going, and what they could do to make sure that their time spent together was genuinely worthwhile.

Then Mark shared something that’s stuck with me. When The 9/11 Commission Report was released, he read the whole thing. In one section, they talk about four failures as the root of that attack being possible: failure of policy, failure of capabilities, failure of management, and failure of imagination. Failure of imagination, Mark explained, means that no one imagined that such an attack could happen. The CTC (Counterterrorism Center) never even considered that aircraft could be used as a weapon, so they never did any analyses for what that could look like or how to prevent it. There was no level at which the 9/11 attacks occurred to them, even though it’s their job to think from an enemy’s perspective.

For the failures of policy, capabilities, and management, The 9/11 Commission Report offers pages and pages that discuss how to use political science strategies to make changes and prevent other attacks in the future.

For failure of imagination, there were no suggestions.

If this was one of the primary failures that allowed 9/11 to happen, Mark explained wondering, why are there not more thoughts on ways to solve it? How do people become more imaginative?

Through art. Through creativity. Through a willingness to look at the world from a fantastical lens. Through an experience that transcends reality. Through music and performance and storytelling and visuals that make you feel things or consider perspectives you might never have come to on your own.

I’m not saying attending a couple more plays would have magically given the CTC the creative powers to imagine every possible terrorist attack scenario. And I hate that the kind of imagining they would need to suspect that kind of attack requires believing the absolute worst of humanity. But regardless, the capacity to imagine, whether it’s a happy dream or a nightmarish possibility, is essential. Cultivating the ability to see the world from a multitude of perspectives fundamentally rewires people’s brains, both in how they problem-solve and consider issues in their own lives, and in how they see and respond to other human beings.

And that’s why I have to keep doing this. It may not be a direct response to the horrors that happened this weekend, but creating art that opens minds, develops imagination, and encourages compassion has a role to play, however, small, in making the world a better place to live.

– Sam

I arrived yesterday at a residency up in Vermont late in the evening. I check in and take my bags to my small room in the living quarters. Taped to the wall above the desk I see this:

It’s a tiny January calendar cut out and taped to the wall.

Because it might be difficult through just the picture to get a sense of size here is the same tiny January calendar as I see it if I back up a few feet:

See? So tiny.

From the moment I saw it, this tiny little calendar tickled me. Centered as it is above the writing space it is both a focal point and a small bit of data in a vast empty room. In moments like this residency time can feel this way – present but distant and contained. In spaces like these my sense of deadlines and schedules is always more fluid. I feel myself moving on the order of human to human rather than human to institution.

When I lived in Paris for three months while studying Roy Hart voice work I became a kind of monk. I woke every morning at 6:30am and made myself breakfast and lunch in a slow methodical fashion. I placed a book and a notebook in my bag and got on the train for classes. At the end of the day I rode home and placed these same items on a table in the exact same place. Every Wednesday, our one half day during the week, I opened the notebook to a list of places I’d determined would be interesting to see and I went to one of them. At night I exercised according to a schedule taped to the wall, made myself dinner and drank a glass and a half of wine, listened to a podcast and then wrote in a journal before going to sleep promptly at 10:30.

The three months I was in Paris I was cleaner than I’ve ever been in my life. Each weekend I washed my tiny apartment from top to bottom. I cleaned floors and backsplashes and under beds. I made all my meals (but for two at the start and end) by hand. I ate slowly. I took an hour on Sundays just to stretch. I walked a ton. I wrote and wrote and wrote.

When thinking about my days there was a kind of familiarity in such repetitive scheduling that was comforting. There was a way in which I never had to plan beyond a 12-hour stretch at a time. I made small changes to my workout schedules, added or took away attractions on my list. I listened to an extra podcast or wrote only a few lines of “I have nothing to say today” if it was true. And I say this to point out that this routine didn’t feel punishing. Quite the opposite. It was perhaps the calmest I’ve ever been.

In certain kinds of ways it was a very productive time. I wrote a lot and learned a lot and thought a lot and was in great shape. But it was also a kind of fallow period. I had lots of projects on the horizon that I knew I would return to but I didn’t make much contact with those collaborators. I didn’t write up plans and ideas for rehearsals. I didn’t think much about the specifics of the actual pieces.

I just sort of readied myself to be ready.

I wonder if I hadn’t been in classes, hadn’t had an obvious check mark for the “I’m being productive” box, if I could have given myself that kind of schedule and time to be ready…

I wonder if I’d tried to fill every moment outside of those classes with high intensity activities and meetings and stuff if the class work would have sunk in quite as deeply…

I wonder if the insane burst of things that came after this quiet fallow phase would have been quite as insane or quite as much of a burst.

If I look at the past few months there are ways in which things have had a similar shape to that time in France. My days are filled with the deepest kinds of interactions and lessons and then I stay in most evenings. I have been cleaning far more often and with far less angst than usual. I stand over the sink and wash each dish and feel the water on my hands. I eat carefully, with great choice, and make almost all of it from scratch. For the first time in a long time I read for pleasure and catch myself talking in long slow monologues and writing and writing and writing.

And, weirdly, I worry if this is enough of a life. If such smallness is catching. If I must stare at the clock and the calendar and rev myself up for more.

For now I will content myself to stare at this tiny calendar that will carry me through the weekend and thank whoever left it for making it so small.

– A

When people ask me what I do for Swim Pony, I tell them it’s a little bit of everything – some admin, some stage management, some writing and research, and so on. That’s part of what I love about this job – I get to flex all different parts of my brain and constantly rotate tasks so they stay fresh and interesting.

For Cross Pollination, I manage a lot of logistics – schedule meetings, book spaces, pick up supplies, and process payments. I’m also the documentarian; I go to every meeting and residency gathering and take copious notes that get turned into the public-facing documentation for the program. For the former, I live in a very rational, categorical brain space. For the latter, I let that go and do my best to be aware instead of the emotions and rhythm of the space and the artists.

The incongruence of these two roles isn’t particularly difficult to resolve; as a stage manager, I’m happiest working with directors who encourage me to have creative opinions in addition to detailed prop tracking charts, so maintaining artistic awareness while keeping everything organized isn’t particularly problematic. However, there’s also another layer.

The part that’s hardest to balance is what I see as being “good at my job” with being a human being.

Let me unpack that for you a bit.

Cross Pollination is, almost unfailingly, an incredibly intimate space. Often, the trio of artists are exploring the most foundational motivations between how and why they make art and making the choice to share those with people who in most cases were strangers not long before. They spend a large amount of very concentrated hours together, talking and experimenting and having to open themselves up to things they don’t know how to do or succeed at. Questions like vulnerability, family, and meaningfulness are dug into deeply.

I’m there for all of it, but I’m not really a part of it. Occasionally I participate: often exercises that are led by one person and are completed individually or that are collaborative but not generative feel okay for me to be a part of, because they’re not actively part of discovering the artistic center of the triangle that the trio of artists form.

But mostly I do my best to stay an objective outsider. The point of me doing the documentation for Swim Pony instead of Adrienne is to have an outside eye who can write about the experiences of all the artists as intimately as possible (hence my always being in the room) without the bias of being one of them myself. I don’t participate in most conversations, and I observe the collaborative, creative exercises that take up the majority of the time.

Now, let me stress that I’m not complaining in the slightest: I’m very aware of how fortunate I am to get to be in the room with so many amazing people. I feel like I’m gleaning secrets about being a lifelong artist that take most people ten or twenty years to discover for themselves. Every day I’m in a Cross Pollination gathering, I feel like my mind is firing on a million different pistons as ideas I never even thought about spark from things people say. I often compare myself to a sponge, constantly absorbing as much as I possibly can.

But every once in a while, the sponge gets oversaturated. One week, an individual exercise I thought I could participate in and then withdraw and take notes about during the recap instead gave me an emotional breakdown. Another time, I found myself crying in the midst of a conversation before playing a game and had no idea where the tears came from.

I always feel guilty in these moments. I feel like it’s selfish to draw attention to myself or to take up emotional space when I’m supposed to be the objective observer. I feel like I’m losing respect by not being able to keep it together and deal with my shit on my own time, when these residencies aren’t about me. I feel unprofessional, sometimes even immature or childish.

Nobody’s ever told me to feel this way. Adrienne would never tell me I’m not allowed to have feelings; these are personal expectations I’ve internalized for myself. In fact, often I like and even prefer to operate this way: as a stage manager, being required to be the one who stays calm and solves the problem is often how I actually do become calm. Fake it ‘til you make it, you know.

But apparently that doesn’t always work. And in this case, maybe it shouldn’t. If I’m going to really understand what’s being discovered in each residency and be able to document the process with any accuracy, I have to let myself be part of the room. I have to let myself be raw and open and affected, just as the artists are. I have to stop setting myself standards of total objectivity and think of myself more as an anthropologist. Anthropologists don’t do research by watching people like zoo animals; rather, they integrate themselves into communities while also maintaining an outsider’s eye.

Because taking up space isn’t about being one of the artists in residency. It’s about being a human being.

When I visited Barcelona a couple years ago, one of my friends decided she was going to use the opportunity to remember and practice all the Spanish she’d ever learned and refused to speak English to any of the locals we met. Likewise, most of the people we interacted with at stores or restaurants wanted to practice their English when talking to us. It was hard work at times to cross the communication barrier, as neither side was fluent, but when a whole conversation was achieved with understanding on both sides, it was always extremely satisfying. My friends and I would return to our airbnb rental at the end of the day, and we’d be completely exhausted, not just from the physical activity of exploring new places, but from the  mental openness required of being immersed in a different culture and trying to communicate in a different language.

Cross Pollination feels a little like that. This week, Adrienne is working with sculptor Shelley Spector and theater/dance dramaturg and deviser Mark Lord. Adrienne and Mark both work in the theater world, so in some ways they speak the same language, but they approach their form so differently that they’re definitely using different forms or dialects of it. Meanwhile, Shelley, as a visual artist, is often speaking another language entirely. But all three parties are constantly asking questions and seeking answers from the others, and the moments where everybody reaches equal footing and understanding, whether it’s by participating in an exercise led by one artist, or by conducting interviews that let the others ask in-depth questions, are every bit as satisfying as when Jess had whole conversations with Spanish shopkeepers.

But while I could often let go of the Spanish conversations when I left them, Cross Pollination has a much more lasting effect. The conversations are so dense and openness and authenticity so sought after that I always leave mentally exhausted. But to add to that, not only are the Cross Pollinators communicating across different languages, but their explorations don’t just consist of walking around a city or hiking up a mountain; they’re often trying totally new things, using muscles that they may  not even know they have. The work may not be difficult, necessarily, but the newly discovered muscle can end up feeling sore just because it’s so out of practice.

But soreness is exciting when it means you’ve achieved something. Communicating in another language opens the world so much more than being isolated in your own. And Cross Pollination may leave us exhausted ad oversaturated, but it’s the best feeling there is.

[Let me start with a moment of clarification: I am not Adrienne. I’m Sam, and as I work full-time for Swim Pony, I have now become a more regular blog contributor alongside Adrienne. She’ll still be writing as much as ever, but as there was some confusion when my last post was published, I just want to make sure I’m not given any false impressions. Also, thanks to MJ Kaufman for the snazzy title to this post. Onward!]

We are knee-deep in our first week of Cross Pollination right now, with Chris Forsyth and MJ Kaufman. My job for the project is logistics coordinator and documentarian; I schedule meetings, book spaces, coordinate bringing in outside artists to help out, purchase supplies, process paychecks, and manage much of the social media and web presence. At the end of each Cross Pollination week, I’ll also be writing and publishing Swim Pony’s official documentation of the residency. All this allows Adrienne to be fully invested in cross pollinating as an artist, without having to simultaneously stress about micro details that take her out of the process.

For me, it also means that I have the fascinating observational perspective of getting to be at every meeting and every rehearsal for every group, to soak in and take notes on the conversations that happen and ideas that develop. The whole idea of Cross Pollination is to bring together artists who would probably never all be in a group or collaborating. Therefore, I am continually struck by surprise over how many parallels exist across different groups, even in these early stages.

Some parallels make sense, of course: with Adrienne as a common factor in each group, it’s not surprising that I’ve heard about storytelling through collage, aversion to plot, and an interest in gaming systems as a way into audience integration in almost every meeting. However, much more interesting are the commonalities that have come up in unexpected ways, which seem to say a lot about how Philadelphia inspires people and the questions that artists of all kinds ask themselves.

Each group starts with a preliminary “coffee date,” where the three artists grouped together meet and do some initial getting-to-know-you chatter to make sure there’s not a horrendous personality clash. Then there are two more preparatory meetings before the group’s Cross Pollination round, which allows time for more concrete conversations about what might happen during the week in terms of both content and form (allowing me to make sure they have an appropriate space and any supplies they can think of ahead of time).

One of our groups, Mark Lord and Shelley Spector, along with Adrienne, had their first of the two preparatory meetings last week. There was a lot of interest in marking art from found objects and spaces, particularly those found in a space that is a really tight, specific container, such as an Amtrak train. They talked about a core value of audience takeaway, about building something tangible and offering a tactile experience, and the desire to work in a space that’s not neutral. There was a conversation about “interventions,” an art term for something existing in a place where it’s not supposed to be (such as when Shelley and her family were offered a hayride in the middle of Philadelphia). The group hit a stride on the topic of undercutting American consumerism, things that could be done in or relating to retail spaces to poke fun at them, or alternatively to bring tranquility into holiday shopping spaces (especially since their residency will be the week immediately following Black Friday). Then they veered back to the idea of objects’ stories and the spirit of gift-giving that exists alongside the rampant consumerism come December. We all left the meeting with heads spinning, excited and inspired to let the thoughts simmer and talk more next time.

The next morning, Shelley sent us a follow-up email that offered a new proposal that brought together many of the ideas that had been discussed: translating the idea of a train into the more diversified subway, and building a collapsible tent or “store” that gives gifts of objects or performance to subway riders. Adrienne responded with interest and curiosity in what can make something on the subway a “gift” in a way that genuinely offers a positive experience rather than bothering people. The conversation ended there for the time being; it will come up again at our final prep meeting, and it’s anyone’s guess if we will ultimately end up doing anything close to that, given the number of ideas that float around in all the Cross Pollination conversations.

But regardless of whether it happens, that idea is out there. Now, let me talk a little about this week… Adrienne, Chris, and MJ’s prep conversations were very different. Topics included family, education, structure vs. freedom, what it means to be “productive,” funders, event coordination, making theatre feel like a rock concert, artistic inspirations, and collaging of different elements in one space. We went into the week with a lot of topics of interest but no concrete plans. The week started with some slow explorations, but towards the end of the second day, we landed on an idea that inspired the rest of the week.

Chris, MJ, and Adrienne tried a couple different ways of layering all their expertises on top of each other: Chris playing guitar, MJ writing, and Adrienne directing all at the same time. One of the later experiments explored the question of how to bring instrumental music to the foreground instead of it always being supplemental to text/plot. Two actors were asked to read from a long, non-dramatic text that MJ had written previously, a sentence at a time, with long gaps between each that let the music swell and exist as the priority. The result was something that felt like a live podcast, with the way the music interwove with snippets of texts in a powerful auditory (but visually relatively unstimulating) experience. The group connected this to a comment Adrienne had made about particularly enjoying listening to music in the car, as part of a journey. So we talked about maybe making this “live podcast” a performance piece in the back seat of vehicles: what if we called an Uber driver, then a musician and two actors got in and suddenly were providing art to the driver?

The next day:
-So, are we riding around in a car today?
-Cars are a little small; we couldn’t all fit…
-They’re also unsustainable.
-…Yeah, driving a car around totally aimlessly is probably not a great idea.
<Pause>
-What if we do it on the subway?

And with that, we were off. We spent the rest of the day riding the Market-Frankford line back and forth, particularly the elevated section going all the way out to Frankford Transportation Center, and experimenting with ways to bring performance into a subway car without it feeling overly intrusive, like something we were offering to the riders but not forcing upon them. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t; there’s still more to explore and tweaks to work out.

But all I could think about was how, totally unexpectedly, we’d ended up doing something so similar to what Shelley had proposed for their week. Artists of totally different mediums, in very different ways and for totally different reasons, hit upon the idea of working on the subway as a public and meaningful place/opportunity to share different kinds of art with people.

As I said, I don’t know if Shelley and Mark’s week will result in subway art at all. But at this moment, the connectedness of these experiences – the fact that each week of Cross Pollination doesn’t exist in isolation but is fed by shared inputs of the same city and issues in the world – feels both serendipitous and meaningful.

Recently, Swim Pony began work on a new project called THE END. Designer Maria Shaplin, Sam and I all gathered together to start imagining how we start a conversation about what it means to die. It’s rare that I write publicly at these earliest stages of process. Normally, this time is something protected, delicate, and I worry about exposing it to the light of the outside world.

When I write grants for THE END I start by saying things like this:

THE END is a blend of theater and game.

THE END is a personalized journey.

THE END is a meditation.

THE END is a performance for an audience of one.

THE END begins with an invitation:

An elegant letter arrives in the mail. It offers instructions for the first contact (“Sit in a quiet corner for three minutes in silence, then email the address below with the first sentence that comes to mind about mortality.”) At the bottom of the paper is a date and these embossed words: “This will be THE END. What happens between then and now is up to you.”

This kind of writing exemplifies the state of mind that I am in when I first begin a project. I start by defining the very biggest containers I sense the work will fit into. I write what I think I know to be true. I state what I hope the work will provoke. These large scale definitions, things like “meditation” or “journey,” help me define the texture of what is to come. I often talk about creating a litmus tests for the work generated: in the earliest phases I want to know if the play should taste like lemon, feel like sandpaper, or sound like the wind. At the other end of the spectrum live tiny moments, flashes of a stage image or the feeling of a particular moment for the audience, that I sense must fit in somewhere even if I don’t quite yet know how. This is how I can sense that I must create a fancy invitation or include a particular piece of music.

The work that follows these initial impulses is the slow meeting of the largest and smallest imaginings. The process is the slow and steady progress of filling in the middle.

My collaborators and I begin by playing a game called My Gift of Grace. In it, we ask each other questions ranging from what fears we have about playing the game to what we want done with our body after we have died. The questions provoke conversations. They spin off into wild forests of feelings and beliefs. We can never manage to get through more than 7 cards in a sitting. There are 47 in the deck and we have made it to #23.

We write about death in 30 minute increments. The topics range from friends who have passed away to our beliefs about the afterlife. I recall the experience of seeing Paris’ Catacombs and nearly having a panic attack. I pull out the journal I kept at the time and transcribe words from six years ago:

It felt like palpable fear. Mostly, I just wanted to leave. I wanted to think of something ready to say about it (a real skill and crossbones, SO MANY FEMURS!) in case asked but mostly I wanted so much to be out and away. I simultaneously wanted to be close to the people I love most, to hug them, mesh into them, to prove we are in love and vital and alive and life seizing and at the same time throw away everything, my family, my relationship, all of it, and find something more REAL, to embrace and confront any doubt I’ve ever had and know that I’d feel more secure having been willing to give everything up to find the truth.

Later I make a list of all the things in my life that I remember dying, roughly in order:

• My father’s father
• My mother’s grandmother
• My mother’s other grandmother
• A kitten named Diva (hit by a car)
• The class rabbit Thumper (in our backyard while we had him at home for the summer)
• A caterpillar we wanted to grow into a butterfly
• Another kitten named Diva (sick when we got her)
• Two girls from my middle school killed in a fire (we sang for them a song in the choir concert)
• Two green anole lizards whose names I don’t remember
• A frog
• Several fish
• A cage of gerbils
• A mouse
• A boy from my high school (committed suicide)
• My iguana Iggy
• The plants in my college dorm room
• A girl from my college (car accident)
• My childhood cat Koko
• My childhood dog Barkley
• The plants in my first apartment
• My childhood cat Jojo
• The plants I planted in my south Philly backyard
• My partner’s father
• My partner’s grandmother
• My partner’s childhood cat Mandu
• My partner and I’s cat Tallulah
• My childhood cat Bill
• My mother’s mother
• My partner’s grandfather
• My father’s mother
• My mother’s father
• My mother’s sister

We play with spending 5 minutes in silence just allowing ourselves to think about a particular aspect of this topic and then writing in online dialogue with each other from different spaces.

We create questionnaires that try to capture the information one might need if they were to take a journey into such a land and create passports for confronting the underworld. Like some kind of Olympian god deciding the fate of an adventurer, we are uncertain about whether the player should be assured a road back out.

And by the end of these hours of initial work we send an invitation out to others to come and see some of what we’ve made. Tomorrow we’ll find out what works and what doesn’t, what gaps we made a little progress in closing, and which need more work to bridge all that space between the largest and smallest known quantities.

This is the way the work gets made, not in single genius leaps but in tiny incremental progress.

In process.

In practice.

In slowly figuring out how to take what is inside and make it manifest in the world.

– A

Adrienne and I are starting off fall working on something a little out of the ordinary for Swim Pony: a “play play,” as Adrienne likes to call them. Adrienne is guest directing The Children’s Hour at EgoPo Classic Theater, a 1930s period drama about an all-girls boarding school, one girl who doesn’t quite fit in, and the destruction she wreaks with a slanderous story about her headmistresses’ supposed secret love for each other.

Despite the heaviness of many of the scenes, there is a lot of laughter and joy and support in the rehearsal room as we unpack these characters and their stories together. While we work on the show, Adrienne is doing a little guest blogging for EgoPo as well…

 Check out her first post on their company blog!

S

There’s this term I use for plays that I think epitomize the passive theater experience: Play Plays.

In the past, when I’ve used the “play play” term I‘m generally making fun of a kind of play that exists in a very narrowly defined idea of theater one that, in my opinion, doesn’t makes the full use of the superpowers of a live medium. I’ve been thinking a lot about the word “play” in the last couple years and in particular about the ways our “plays” contain very little “play” for the people we invite in to experience them. I’ve been looking to games as inspiration for how theater might learn to do things a little differently. Lately, I’ve realized I need to do more than just read about these ideas, I want to put them into action.

So! This summer Swim Pony is going to re-define it’s own snarky definition.

We’re launching “Play Play”: an exploration of theater and games in collaboration to find whatever engaged and play-full experiences might be possible. We’re inviting anyone interested in the intersection of games and theater as an avenue for play (play) to join in on an open-source six week research and exploration project. What exactly does that entail?

Throughout June, July and August the Play Play team will meet up six times for 2.5 hours, the first half for research and discussion and the second for on the ground trial and error in the real world. This is pure research, no final products in mind here. We’re just interested in learning more about what’s out there, and conducting some simple experiments in real time. Swim Pony will offer up a meeting space, some snacks and a little cash if an idea simply needs some resources to come to completion. Meetings will be lead collectively and topics of interest decided together.

So if you’re already looking into game and theater hybridization or if you’re just intrigued by the idea look at the dates below and email swimponypa@gmail.com with your name, preferred email and a few sentences about why you’re interested.

Participation is free and selection will be first come, first serve-ish. (What does that mean? Mostly, if you email first you’re in! That said, we want to create a balanced group, ideally with a variety of perspectives and experiences so we’re just being upfront that we reserve the right, if we have to cap, to pull from responses with an eye for group diversity.)

Can’t take part! Have no fear. We’ll chronicle the work and share a post on each week’s discoveries on the blog.

THE NITTY GRITTY DETAILS

DATES: Mondays June 22nd & 29th, July 13th & 20th, August 3rd & 10th. All from 10am – 12:30pm. YOU MUST AGREE TO COME TO AT LEAST 5. Everyone gets one off but the idea of this is to get a running convo, which isn’t possible if it’s too hodge-podge attendance-wise. If you need to miss one please indicate the date in your email.

LOCATION: TBD depending on size. We’ll let you know.

Best!

A