When saying "yes" gets me more than I bargained for (in a great way!)

I'm very excited to announce that a project I've been working on will premiere in Dublin, Ireland, January 14-17, 2016, as part of the First Fortnight Festival. The work is a solo performance written and performed by my colleague and friend, Jenny Macdonald, a Canadian by birth who's lived and worked in Ireland for the last several years as an artist and arts facilitator.

Jenny's piece, called Enthroned, tells the story of a young woman's quest to discover her path in life, and it uses the language and imagery of folk and fairy tales to construct a metaphor for this very personal journey. Jenny asked me to work with her as a director and dramaturg on the development of the piece, and it's been a powerful learning experience for me. Mostly because I've had the privilege of watching an artist who I respect dig deeply into a personal story without becoming indulgent or precious about her work.

Before we started working on this performance project, Jenny and I knew each other for about six years through our work together on an NYU study away program. We had never collaborated in this capacity, but Jenny had an instinct to ask and I had an instinct to accept. We spent two weeks together in a rehearsal room in New York City in July, working through the first half of the play. Then we reconvened in Dublin in November for five days of workshopping the second half. Now, we're Skypeing, Whatsapping, and texting our way to her premiere on January 14.

Jenny and I will be joined in Dublin in January by Troy Hourie, a Toronto-based scenographer and installation artist who is helping us to create a visual performance world that includes artifacts from Jenny's journey. All of this comes together on the campus of St. Patrick's Hospital, Ireland's largest independent, not-for-profit, health service. Jenny will perform in a former chapel, now gym facility, that we'll transform into a performance space. It's site-specific literally and site-specific therapeutically, as the First Fortnight Festival features work that explores the intersection of art and mental health.

A few months before Jenny approached me about working with her on this project, I'd made a decision to stop directing and focus on my own writing. But something about the project intrigued me, I think primarily because I sensed that Jenny would approach the solo performance differently, and she has done just that. I've learned a lot from Jenny and from our work together, and I'm thrilled to collaborate with the team of artists she's assembled on both sides of the Atlantic. Good lesson for me. It's fine to hone in on what I want to accomplish, but not at the expense of blindly turning away from opportunities that provide space to grow. That's not always easy to know in advance, but listening to my gut seems to help.

Follow the First Fortnight Festival on Twitter @firstfortnight and stay turned for updates from Dublin in 2016!

Learning lessons by looking North

These actions by Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Open-hearted.

Fearless.

Brave.

Humane.

Leadership.

Acknowledging the vulnerability

I'm not sure whether it's an accumulation of sadness and frustration or whether it's a paralysis emerging out of a fear that there are no viable solutions. I feel somewhat powerless when faced with the shootings in San Bernardino, Donald Trump's call to close the U.S. to all Muslims, the ongoing Chicago police department debacle, the deepening debate around campus climate for students of color, and the continued terrorism happening throughout the world.

Same overwhelming feeling of heaviness this time last year because of the unrest surrounding the injustices of Ferguson and Staten Island. Then those two NYPD officers were shot and killed, and the heaviness just got worse. I just wanted to leave New York City. For good.

Now I find it difficult to fall asleep at night. My mind wanders through the news and experiences of the day, and I imagine disastrous outcomes. Or I think of things I could say. Should say. Or actions I could take that might somehow change what's happening in the world. Then the defeated feeling sets in.

It's all a bit of a delusion of grandeur to be honest. Why would I, one person, be able to do any single thing that potentially changes the course of events in the world? As a person who likes to fix problems, I find it frustrating that I can't solve any of this. Immediately. I hate waiting. And then that frustration leads to anger, often misdirected, and then I resort to wondering why everyone can't just get along. Terribly pollyanna of me and embarrassing to acknowledge that it happens.

I try to be rational about it all. Since I can't fix the problems of the world, I decide that the only action I can take must come from what I do as one individual interacting with another. I cannot single-handedly change Donald Trump's mind or the minds of his supporters, but I can ask questions, lots of them, about why people believe what they believe, and maybe in that process of dialoging find ways to share thoughts that could shift or soften the viewpoints of others. I can continue to work for inclusivity in my classrooms, with the recognition that we all are fallible and I will make mistakes, and hopefully, my students will see that my intentions are to help broaden inclusivity rather than limit it. I can also refuse to vote for legislators or legislation that perpetuate existing systems of power and privilege, including my own.

The last point is easier written than done, as that kind of sacrifice of power and privilege really isn't rewarded in US culture, unless you’re Mark Zuckerberg or someone with massive wealth who gives part of it away. Then you get a lot of publicity.

Our capitalist principles don't encourage it. Rather, it's ascend up the ladder, and if you don’t there’s something wrong with you. That's the American narrative that we can't get rid of. It's like trying to strip genes out of a sequence of DNA so that a disease doesn't occur in the offspring of a carrier. Not possible yet. And it's not possible to strip out the ambition that comes from the pursuit of the American Dream. That pursuit has fostered greatness and created uncomfortable stratifications. Positive and negative. Not always an easy dream to embrace.

So where does that leave me?

With more words than I thought I had on all of this, but not with much comfort. Maybe expressing fear and confusion is the way to acknowledge the vulnerability. Maybe it’s expressing empathy, trying to identify with the plight of the other, rather than celebrating that it’s not me. Maybe it’s just sitting in the discomfort of it all and recognizing that the only way out is through.

When technology slows things down...

For the last three or four years of teaching, I've been trying to incorporate technology into my teaching practice, particularly around assessing student work, as a way to capitalize on all of the advances that technology seems to provide, particularly around speed and convenience.

For a couple of semesters, I tried marking all of my papers on my iPad. This started off as a great innovation, but after multiple rounds of papers, I realized that the iPad, while interesting as an interface, was actually slowing down my grading process. It's not easy to write comments on an iPad screen, at least not for me, and the process just seemed more cumbersome, even though it eliminated the need for me to carry around a stack of papers and a pen.

I also tried using my iPad and my laptop computer to take notes during scene presentations and directing projects in my acting and directing classes. I thought that my notetaking on these devices would easily translate to feedback sheets for my students, and then I would simply send those notes along via email. Great idea in theory, except that when I went back to my typed notes, I found myself re-typing and re-phrasing everything anyway, because the notes didn't quite make sense. I also took the notes rather randomly, and the re-organization process took more time than I anticipated.

After about four years of trying all of this technology, this semester I finally went back to handwritten notes, and I've experienced higher efficiency in my ability to gather data for feedback while I'm watching a presentation. It feels antiquated to me, particularly given the current push in higher education to use technology in the teaching and delivery of information. However, I can't deny that going back to pen and paper has left me much more room for my own research and creative output. And none of my students have seemed worse for my choice. I thought I'd be getting complaints from students about not being able to read my handwriting, but that hasn't happened. I still deliver the notes vial email, because I scan them in and then send them as PDFs.

I've also created clear marking sheets for each of the projects that I assign, and those marking sheets keep my comments organized. I move more quickly to the specific area on a sheet when I'm writing than I can on a computer or tablet. Maybe a technology specialist could come up with an interface that would work beautifully and efficiently on my iPad or my laptop, but honestly, I'm not so interested. There's something about holding a paper in one hand and a pen in the other that feels more authentic to me, more connected to the labors of the student. I also think handwritten comments read as me being more engaged with the students' work. I'm not sure why that is, but it's how I feel about it at this moment.

I worry that I'm getting old fashioned way earlier than I should be. I'm not against using technology at all; in fact, I'm all for it if it makes for more efficiency, stronger student engagement, and better teaching. So far, I haven't been more efficient, and I'm not sure that in my particular field, one that primarily focuses on human beings communicating with each other in real time, that technology creates stronger student engagement or better teaching. Again, I'm open to the possibilities, but I'd like for someone to demonstrate the benefits.

Packaging terror

Last night I was watching the news before going to bed, and I saw an excerpt of a new ISIS propaganda video that apparently has several versions produced in different languages, including English. There was a section of the video that flashed through the last three or four American presidents, calling them awful names, then landed on a graphic that featured the letters "LGBT" and the word "sodomites" with a voiceover saying something about America being a land of sodomites. In the moment I dismissed it as gibberish, but the images and language kept coming back to me as I tried to fall asleep.

Then I started thinking about other images that I'd seen throughout the day, pumping through the flat screen TV at work or on the Internet news sites that pop up when I open a browser. A graphic with text indicating that Ted Cruz is surging in the Republican presidential polls (Isn't he one of the many Americans who also doesn't care for sodomites?). A young black teenager being shot by police in the streets of Chicago. (Isn't that a violent act that is again terrorizing a whole community of people?). And the list kept running through my head, so much so that I couldn't fall asleep.

Taken generally, there's an alarming overlap between all of these viewpoints and actions, even though I recognize that there are vast differences in circumstances, situations, and levels of violence involved. I'm making the point because I think we need to start looking at how terror works and how it's packaged. If the purpose of terrorism is to terrify, render people immobile out of fear, maybe it would be helpful to think about how actions and symbols that we've come to accept as cultural norms have evolved over time, or have come in a specific moment in time, to represent something terrifying for a particular community of people. We become reactive because of our fear, and as a result, we wage campaigns to restore "order" through violence, whether it be physical or spoken. People can believe what they want to believe about so-called sodomites. Police officers need to do their jobs. But when do beliefs and actions cross over a line and create feelings of terror in other people?

I have no sympathy for ISIS or any other group that uses terror to control people or to make a point, and I want the violence that they propagate to stop. However, on this day before Thanksgiving, I'm just thinking about what it means to have freedom and feeling thankful for that freedom. Part of having freedom is taking the opportunity to self-reflect about how I use that freedom. I'm wondering if we could collectively begin to take a hard look at how we inadvertently terrorize each other because of what we believe to be "right" or "just" or "fair." I believe that the only way to really change the world is to consider what I do to contribute to a given problem, figure out what, if anything, I can do to change my behavior, and then model that change for others. If we looked more carefully at how we package our own terror, maybe we'd become more effective at ending terrorism on a worldwide scale.