In memory of my feelings.

Dear friends and supporters,

Quiet mornings have a dancer in them, spectre-thin, faint and small as a dry leaf, scudding along a remembered sidewalk. Or a broader dancer, transparent, who glides down the avenue soundless as a gondola, quietly carrying this or that audience from performances past. How lovingly they lift the mind, rising into cool skies, for that moment that leaps without landing, a well-made espresso in a glass, touching heart and brain, moving on.

Other mornings contain the leaf blowers of the imponderable world and sirens passing unquietly. City streets break beneath a jackhammer and concrete saw. Unstable connectivity makes my transmission skip. Silver balloons in the shape of numbers wilt on a porch. More colorful balloons have gotten tangled in the wires we used to call “telephone” but that can’t be right any more. Electrical? Anyway, the point is traces of our yesterdays persist, and it may be unwise always to model tomorrow on them alone, on what remains of the wreck when it washes ashore, rather than on some new and as yet unimaginable nonconforming meeting house, gentle as the first glimpse on the horizon off the highway of the drive-in movie screen floating at dusk like an improbably large sideways blank page, about to receive the first projection of the summer. But who among us remembers what that looked like? Maybe just picture a field of your favorite flowers: iris, gerbera daisy, even ranunculus. No image works that well when standing in for the unknown, when it’s the future that we’re building out of grief and a fragile, outgrown reality. Maybe building is too strong a word for the kind of work we performance carpenters do. Preparing. Setting the stage. Anyway, relations are more durable than the entities who inhabit them. Does anybody still not understand that? “Thoughts are made of the same stuff things are,” said William James. Let us think better, then, in order to produce better “things,” and review how to treat one another while we do.

I mean to say that while other vendors crank open their shutters and hang out the welcome sign, some of us still toil in the design phase, quickly as possible, slowly as necessary, a summer of preparation, unhurried, with plenty of pausing for looking up words, definitions of, for example, “care,” which may have mutated, and taken a more central position on the stage of what comes next.

As this emerging unfolds as unevenly and contentiously as did the shutting down, where might we look for guidance but to an archive? The documents of what came before never felt more alive than they do now at the Experimental Sound Studio, as we begin, at the invitation of this vital institution, work on 5 beginnings: ESS, our new performance for presentation in some live form in the fall. We will select five performances from ESS’s rich history and remake their beginnings, sequencing them into a five-part performance, a mini-essay with a lyrical trajectory. We will direct new artists to perform the work of archive artists, facilitating a set of intergenerational introductions. Questions posed in years past by the artists in their moment persist and haunt us now. How have those questions aged? How have we? How would we answer them? What have we lost, or failed to address in our daily rush into tomorrow, our chaotic progress? What modes and manner of creativity have we neglected in this strange future?

Others will ask, what constitutes a “beginning”? That remains to be seen. The composer Morton Feldman said, “The next ten minutes… We can go no further than that, and we need go no further. If art has its heaven, perhaps this is it.” In our case, it’s the first five minutes. We approach them as we do the vista-like beginning that encircles us at the same time, waking up in a struggling world.

That is to say, begin again: without panic, with a certain justice of response.

Matthew Goulish, dramaturg and writer
Every house has a door