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Dear friends and supporters,

One could speak in terms economical and philosophical at once when stating that one does not receive returns without investment. When I write the word return, in this way as a noun, it connotes both a “rate of return” or the receipt of the initial invested value increased and transformed in time, and the moment or act of arriving once again at a place or activity, a repetition, as in the sentence, “After months—years—away, they safely returned to the theater.” To invest means both 1) to devote time, energy, and attention to an activity, and 2) to make an offering in support of a venture, as a vote of confidence in the venture’s eventual success (in the form of return). The word literally means to clothe, to cover with a garment, as if putting a vest on someone endows that person with authority, or anyway demonstrates belief in that person’s capability. We find ourselves in a circle of meaning. Authority as such does not arise without belief bestowed by another, while that belief does not arise without an initial demonstration of authority. Returns arise only out of this feedback loop between the one who acts and the one who invests in the one who acts. We might accurately describe these relational roles as performer and audience. 

Readers of this newsletter will know that this year, Every house has a door experienced a theater return. After completing a series of short performance films in 2021, then offering a large-scale outdoor live performance in 2022, in 2023 we performed The Fossil Record to open the New Performance Turku Biennale in the City Theatre of Turku, Finland. We followed this with three sold-out, self-produced performances in Chicago in October at Link’s Hall, which we rented. These events closed a three-year loop that began with the last sentence of our first newsletter in March, 2020, “How do we prepare for the day when we will re-enter, dancing through the eye of a needle, the vast evacuated theater?” Our theaters were not vast, although they felt that way during their extended times of vacancy. And when we danced through the needle’s eye, we found ourselves not alone but with the increasing, enthusiastic crowd that that microspace surprisingly accommodated. When we returned to the theater, the audience returned with us, or vice versa, fulfilling the relation and the dual investment/return that actualizes all performance. Lin Hixson our director has spoken of understanding “How not to touch it so the performance still holds its promise,” through to the end, when the lights come up again and the audience applauds, to celebrate the spell as well as to break it. Maybe this holding of promise while also paradoxically fulfilling it contributes to the other aspiration of our recent work: to present a one-hour performance for grown-ups that will not bore a nine-year-old.

In such a spirit, Lin and Essi Kausalainen (the Finland-based textile artist, our collaborator through our Carnival of the Animals series of projects, and our resident authority on children) and I, together wrote a 39-minute lecture about our work on The Fossil Record. We presented it in Chicago on October 27th. Our design team Shelf Shelf has since given these words a material form in a publication of which we plan to print 200 copies. We will send this reading companion to anyone who wants it and who makes a donation of any amount, continuing to invest in our efforts into the year 2024. I intend this newsletter as a fundraising appeal, despite my apparent immediate drift from that objective, or if not drift, indirect and modulated approach to appealing for your support. Now to make sense of our current activities, I need to say a few words about our future, as well as our past, intentions.

We have been invited to stage a performance of an impossible ballet written in lucid prose by Mina Loy sometime in the early years of the 20th century titled Crystal Pantomime. We will offer this work in May 2024 in conjunction with the exhibition of Loy’s artworks at The Arts Club. I plan to write about this project in a future newsletter. For now I will say about it that we have extended the invitation to include our friend and colleague, the esteemed artist Diane Simpson, whom we asked to design a set piece in response to Mina Loy’s commercial lamp designs. It’s a long and detailed story, and I only mention it now because as I write this Diane has an exhibition of new works at Chicago’s Corbett vs. Dempsey Gallery on view until January 13th. In parallel to Diane’s work, the gallery is screening two of our pandemic films in the Carnival series in the ideal viewing circumstance of their Video Vault. The juxtaposition of our films and Diane’s sculptural creations acknowledges our common concerns and aesthetics, as well as our past and future collaboration. For us this moment closes another year’s-long loop, offering a return on the investment that we, like so many, made in those months of silence and separation when the theaters were closed, and we took a leap of faith in our open garage studio with a camera. It felt like releasing a carefully composed message into the void of a possibly nonexistent future. We find ourselves in that future now, in the same world that has changed so drastically that we recognize it even in its at times alarming unrecognizability. We must defer to this tormented past as we view our own work from this nearer distance that demands of us the question: what were we doing, and what did we think we were doing, and were those the same thing?

I have not yet mentioned risk—the possibility of loss, the threat of abandonment and isolation. I will say about that now only briefly, not wanting to overstay my welcome as this year draws to a close, that it seems we disarm the dangers that we encounter only when we run directly into them. Why do that? Fearlessness or foolishness? I have never completely grasped the difference. Our performances in all their forms aspire to offer a haven for those who invest them with attention—a hospitable, composed event in which we might share experiences at once strange and familiar, that take us out of and back into ourselves. Thank you for helping us to continue these activities, that we hope harbor the singular, lasting, and consequential equilibrium of a meeting place for work and play, noise and silence, gesture and poetry, in an extended act that holds its promise until the moment it releases us once again, as complex as the world although perhaps more forgiving. I wonder now, as I do with the close of each newsletter, whether my voice will reach you, whether these words will extend across that same familiar emptiness of solitude, whether you will recognize in them a shared attunement and devote the time and attention to them that they request of you. In each instance I and all involved in Every house experience such investment as a gift of boundless affirmation bearing its own wealth of return.

In continued and profound gratitude,
Matthew Goulish, dramaturg