Quick update on what I've been doing, since I've been incommunicado for a bit.  I've been travelling north, stopping in Rhode Island for a fantastic wedding of some amazing people I'd never met (a friend of the friend I'm traveling with), and then up to New Hampshire to stand naked on the edge of an icy mountain, then to Vermont to meet more great friends of my travel partner, and now Maine.  I visited the family I lived with 5 years ago as an apprentice on their farm, and got to watch the whole maple sugaring process (the sap has just started flowing -- perfect timing for a visit to New Englad.)  Last night I taught a class about Twin Oaks at the Maine College of Art (MECA), and today I'm teaching at the University of New England.

The presentations have been going well.  I'm more prepared than I've been for the last many presentations I've given, and the preparation is really paying off.  I'm happy and brilliant and passionately ranting and chatting with students for 20 minutes after class ends.  Ahhh... this is the life.  Last night I stayed in a fancy Bed & Breakfast and took a long bath and read The Fifth Sacred Thing (which I've nver read before -- I'm loving it), and this morning I had strawberries and ice cream for breakfast!  The berries and cream, though, can't compare to the glorious feeling I have when I'm standing in front of a room of 30 college students describing the freedom I feel when I'm walking down the path at Twin Oaks without a shirt on, and they're staring back at me with alternating smiles and bewilderment and horror.

I've actually been having a bit of a challenging time, personally.  Self-judgement stuff, recognizing how stuck I am on figuring out whether I'm essentially, universally, spiritually Right or Wrong.  Yuck.  I'm feeling a lot better today after having such a great time with this last class.  One more talk over lunchtime, meeting up with my travel partner, and then we'll begin the journey south this afternoon.    What a life.

I'm nearly too tired to write tonight, and yet I feel some mixture of desire and obligation to write about this weekend's show.  In a word: extraordinary.  We exploded onto the stage, which most people usually just experience as a crowded and noisy dining room.  We danced out from behind the curtains (which just weeks before had been scraps of fabric sitting in Commie Clothes) in quantities of lacy lingerie never known to exist in one place on this commune ever before.  Cabaret came to life in our dining room this weekend as broccoli-growers and hammock -weavers and tofu-makers metamorphed into (mostly) polished actors and dancers and singers.  We blew away an audience accustomed to communized versions of cheesy musicals and sloppy scene changes.  People who rarely talk to me have been stopping me on the path to tell me how much they enjoyed the show.

A special thing about doing theater on the commune, or any art really, is that our labor system is designed to incorporate projects like this almost seamlessly.  I spent nearly everyday last week working on the show.  I just blocked off time during the days and evenings so I didn't get scheduled for any work.  Earlier in the year, folks voted to give a slew of "labor credits" to putting the show together, so I got to claim work hours for the time I spent working on the show.  It became my major contribution to the commune, on par with the folks working in the garden, cooking meals, fixing toilets, and making hammocks.    We credit work on a basis of time, rather than by job.  Any job that is "labor creditable" (and most are, everything from taking care of children to cooking dinner to decorating for parties) is given one labor credit for an hour of work, regardless of the job.  So, once the community voted to make Cabaret labor creditable (we got about 500 hours for the whole show), we got to claim labor credits for rehearsals and set building and costume meetings and choreographing fantastic dance numbers.  I suddenly became a "professional" actress and director and choreographer again... living in the middle of the woods!

I've been enjoying the experience of an "artists' collective", where we all work to create and support the fulfillment of our basic needs like food and shelter, and then intentionally use our collective energy beyond that to create art, sometimes seperately and often together.  I think of Sean, who recently had an art opening at a gallery in Charlottesville, and the Vulgar Bulgars, the klezmer band that plays regular gigs all over Central Virginia.  There's something about living here that makes the creation of collaborative art a natural mode of expression and engagement.  I think it's one of the ways that we process our experience together.  We share so much, it makes sense that we find additional richness in sharing the self-reflective process of art.

Pictures of the show coming soon, I promise.  I didn't take any on my camera (except at the cast party, which might be too racy for viewing here), so I'll have to get the best from friends who were in the audience.

Opening night of Cabaret on the commune...  last night's dress rehearsal was a bit rough, almost the perfect amount of "rough" to build excitement to do it better tonight.  I don't know how many people to expect from off the farm; I'm worried that the audience might be rather small.  There are nearly 30 people of our 90 person community involved in the show, and even if all 60 people came tonight (which they surely won't, because we're doing three performances and some won't even come at all), they wouldn't fill the house.  We sent out announcements to ex-members and friends of Twin Oaks, and we'll definitely get some audience from that...  I'll report back on Monday and let you all know how it goes.

for all you Wittenbergers out there -- I dug my bell out of a box and I'm wearing it today.  The significance stiill feels strong.  ding ding!

We're in full swing with Cabaret this week.  We're starting to rehearse every evening after dinner (throwing folks out of the dining room at 7 on the dot and then transforming it into our theater, moving the chairs and tables off the “stage” (oh, to have a real stage!) and into the section of the dining hall that in 5 days will be filled with audience members.

I spent all of yesterday working on the show, and I never left home.  The community is bustling with work for the performance: the band is transporting sound equipment and instruments while actors sit on the back deck of the community center rehearsing lines and practicing choreography.  Pieces of the set are at different stages of completion outside the woodshop, and here in the computer offices my stage manager flits back and forth between her computer and mine, clarifying details and reminding me of important questions still unanswered.  I just trekked down to the dairy barn to chat with the person in charge of the set, and as I was walking back up the path and looking out over the garden and the courtyard buildings glowing in the slowly setting sun, I was filled with awe.  We're creating an amazing theatrical production among a group of friends and family, here on our farm, in our home.  Most all of our costumes and set and music are coming from our own caches of resources (Commie Clothes is a fantastic costume shop!).  Apart from the commune itself as a "group project", we rarely have a community-wide event that so many people are involved in creating.  It feels amazing to participate in such intense collaboration.  That's why I moved here in the first place…

And yet, there are some really frustrating pieces to this experience, too.  For many of the people in the chorus (there are 17 Kit Kat dancers!), this is a fun project to devote a few hours to each week at dance rehearsal.  Now that we're into the final week of performance, they're feeling allergic to and resentful of three-hour rehearsals every night.  For those of us who have already been putting in more than 20 hours each week to the show, this final push is what it takes to make all of our work worth the effort.  In daily life on the commune, we're used to having free reign over our time and a high level of choice when it comes to stopping doing something if we aren't enjoying ourselves.  And we've set up work environments and schedules so that most of the time we're enjoying ourselves.  Putting on a show is hard work, especially such an ambitious project like Cabaret.  It's long and dark and weird and there are long stretches of time that the dancers aren't onstage, but are needed to move props and change the set.  I understand that it can get boring backstage, but that's a part of being in a show.  I'm getting a senese that folks who have never been in a show are frustrated by how much time they're spending just standing around waiting until they go onstage next.  Some people left rehearsal early last night to go to a movie, and when we got to the final scene of the night, the stage was half-empty.  I was furious, and in this non-violent, egalitarian community, I didn't feel any "appropriate" outlet for my anger.  People can do what they want; we don't control each other here.  That makes the role of "director" very tricky.  All of the responsibility and seemingly none of the power.  In my ideal world I would talk to all of the people who left and tell them how I feel and they would understand and recommit themselves to working their asses off for the next week.  I can try this (I probably will).  I'm skeptical about its effectiveness.  If people don't want to do it, they won't.  I don't have much confidence in my ability to convince people… oh, this is bullshit.  I actually do have confidence in my ability to talk with people and tell them what's true for me, listen to what's true for them, and work together to find a "solution."  That's what I came here for (stealing a line from the show…), because I belived that that method of conflict resolution was possible.  And it is, I've experienced it.  In moments of anger and feeling disrespected, I don't feel that possibility.  I just want to scream.  It's a lot easier to scream than to seek out these people and spend the time and energy talking and listening, and it's important enough to me to do it -- this is the world I want to create.
 

 I'm exhausted.  Pax and I just returned this afternoon from a speaking gig down in North Carolina at East Carolina University.  We taught 5 classes in a day and a half, mostly about Twin Oaks (though whenever we're there we also throw in at least one class on Polyamory to the "Courtship and Marriage" sociology class -- quite a thrill for these mostly Evangelical Christian students!).  We scooted back up here to be ready for rehearsal this evening, as we start the final week of rehearsals for Cabaret.   My plan tonight was to write some reflections about doing theater in the context of community, but I'm finding I'm just too pooped.  I know it's been a long while since I've written a real entry, and I can't promise you anything until after Cabaret is finished up next weekend.

topics to cover, just to whet your appetite:

1) thoughts on leaving the commune (possibly!)
2) theater in community
3) new relationship!
4) sparking new thought in college students, and how fun it is

and much much more, I assure you

until then, goodnight