But everything excellent is as
difficult as it is rare.

Dear friends and supporters,

We miss you. We miss gathering with you, in an old auditorium, in a new theater, in a nondescript room or any enclosed space that we, through our presence together, claim in the name of performance. In the days that seem so long ago now, unencumbered by the endless looping dialogues and nomenclatures of infectious disease and their vague hopeful mitigations, when meeting for a performance event seemed so routine we only glancingly valued it, I would at times in moments of distance on the then-present, reconsider. Maybe the opposite was true. We did not gather for performance. We created performance in order to gather. That act of gathering demonstrated its own form of collectivity, around a mutually shared focal point, something equidistant to us all, that we could all apprehend with extraordinarily heightened attention, quiet with shared concentration: the performance. The performance event provided that flame-like life force around which we gathered, and came to know one another through how we attended to it in every fleeting moment. We could exist at once. Solitude and community could collapse together as non-negating contradiction, no longer opposites. We could be alone together. In those moments, because we breathed the same air and walked the same aisles, we became in some ways one body. At least we would look that way to a virus, that cannot decide whether it is living or dead, organism or code. I suppose we occupy a more honest conception of humanity now, accepting as we must that one infection endangers all, forcing, despite resistance, the subsequent acceptance of a collective valence to every personal choice. My health choices fold into yours, and yours into mine. In this wobbling new world—like an infant learning to walk, who asks at every unbalanced step: Is this walking? Am I walking now? Have I become one who walks?—some adventurous souls among us have ventured a return to that form of gathering, with the breathing orifices hidden behind veils and filters. How strange to hear singing through a mask, slightly muffled and partitioned from ear, to decipher speech with no lips to watch, shielded not only from aerosols but also from affect. Still the soul translates, maybe even more clearly, certainly more valued, more needed. How close we were, always closer than we knew.

The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote of the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, “that each of the first hundred integers was his personal friend.” So we now make the acquaintance of the Greek alphabet, through close and personal relation, if not exactly friendship, a strange way to learn to read, to come to know every letter as a presence: delta, omicron. They take their turns in the march of sovereigns that will claim more of us, as the months pass, always faster, always slower, never at a synchronous or manageable pace. Yet we rediscover our circles and our networks almost despite ourselves. We become more broadly connected to one another in space and more widely intertwined in time. We at Every house has a door have finished three “pandemic film” projects, and are now completing a fourth. Our third, the archival 5 beginnings: ESS at the invitation of Chicago’s venerable Experimental Sound Studio offered us a structure within which more collaborators could gather from farther apart for short periods to realize a performance film that could be distributed more widely than ever. Thankfully we have moved into a phase in which at least the collaborative team may gather in a room to work together, absent only the displaced audience, who will come to the work later, and from elsewhere, remotely. Our director Lin Hixson has discovered a hybrid form of working, responsive to the moment of performance, but framed through the measured eye of the camera which moves according to a separate logic. For our fourth film project we were able to bring Essi Kausalainen from Helsinki for a residency to design and construct the clothing and “the woods” as an installation environment for the third in our series of short films in the Carnival of the Animals series, The Cuckoo in the Depths of the Woods. Alex Bradly Cohen, Elise Cowin, and Bryan Saner performed their collectively devised choreography. Julia Pello oversaw the camera and Christine Shallenberg the lighting. Sarah Skaggs, our producer, had found and negotiated the in-kind use of an empty storefront, once a gallery, before that a corner neighborhood bar. Abhay Ghiara recorded the voice-over narration. Corey Smith contributes soundtrack music and sound. We had two exhilarating weeks of working together. Watch for the premier in the new year. We hope that the year ahead will allow us to travel again as a team, and even to meet again in order to perform live in a room, without fanfare, delicately, concentrated, and in acknowledgement of all that has changed, the diminished, the amplified, and the persistent durable obbligato of ordinary.

I will say more about Abhay, who sent us his recording of the Cuckoo narration from his new part-time home in Bend, Oregon where he teaches economics. He had more time to devote to this than expected, unable to return for winter break to his family home in the Philippines, stranded by last-minute pandemic border closures. Then the hurricane struck. Customarily I now petition you for tax-deductible donations. If you feel so inclined and able to contribute, please consider not only donating to Every house has a door, but also (or instead) to Abhay’s Pink House community project.* As he writes:

After restoring the roof (Typhoon Rai blew whole sections of it miles away) we will use the rest of the funds raised to start building the first Children’s Book Library on the island of Bohol. This public library is to be located next to the koi meditation pond within the Pink House complex.

We have rediscovered another trait of our condition: generosity. Thank you all for that. We acknowledge the responsibility and the trust that comes with each contribution to our work.

I started with a quotation from Spinoza’s Ethics, to which I will add, beyond difficulty and rarity, everything excellent has its own lightness. I don’t know whether that was true in Spinoza’s 17th century, but I believe it is true now. If we have learned anything as the two year mark of this disaster draws to a close (remember the 19 represents the year of inception) it is the fact of our own ephemerality. We live for only one day, and already the sun declines in the sky. The world turns, and we turn with it. Until the danger subsides, we look forward to meeting you any way we can—in correspondence, over video conferencing platforms, or yes even in the impudent distraction of the chat function. Or maybe we will meet by chance on a street, walking in the protective envelope of the open air and the famous Chicago wind. We have come to understand that every connection, every interaction, resonates beyond itself. Every encounter defines our lives and gives them substance. Every other person offers a degree of salvation. Every word, every touch, shakes the universe.

Matthew Goulish, dramaturg and writer
Every house has a door

*Please note that Pink House is not a registered tax exempt 501(c)3 organization, so donations will be gratefully accepted but will not be tax deductible.