My present bewilderments are a new territory
that make me doubt I have ever really been lost before.

Dear friends and supporters,

I would, under ordinary circumstances, use this last newsletter of the year to reflect on our activities, review the future, and appeal for your support in the form of a tax-deductible donation. In these extraordinary days, who has the impulse to review anything? I take pride in what Every house has accomplished while locked in place: completely redesigning our website, launching this series of newsletters as texts and audio recordings, setting up a garage studio, completing one performance film and beginning a second, while maintaining safety protocols as the most restrictive of creative constraints. Watch for both of our short films to premier on Saturday March 13th, 2021, a date chosen to commemorate the first anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring the novel coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic (March 11th, 2020).

Regarding donations, we will not refuse them. We will put any contribution to use realizing our mission into 2021. We need donations, I will not deny it. However, at this moment, in our city, other organizations need them more. Please consider distributing your limited means to someplace like Kimski Community Kitchen, an inspiration for its innovative, collaborative organizational model, its broad communal scope, its manner of addressing the urgent need of the moment without fanfare, and its precisely calibrated combination of Korean and Polish cuisine.

Where does this “urgent need of the moment” leave us, or where do we find ourselves, we who devote our lives to performance? During these quarantined months I have had the good fortune to review the notebooks of the Every house director, my partner in life and in art, Lin Hixson. She passes them to me—years of notes in typed up form. These lines from Fall 2017 accosted me.

It’s like we are seeing through a turbine
We get a fragmented picture
But we sense the whole

Astonishment paradoxically united with boredom

Define oneself as much by what is excluded as by what is included

Make dance unrecognizable to itself
Make dance foreign to itself

—principles of combination rather than selection—
Is clarity equivalent to readability?
How readable is the world?

Create enormous space around the subject freeing up the mind to move Making the room to move

How do you read in an unreadable world?
How do you think in an unthinkable world?

The days shorten. The winter months descend. Here in the northern midwest United States, I have the sense of winter returning to itself, once again wearing the face that our ancestors recognized early in the last century, in the winter of 1918-1919, when the influenza pandemic ravaged the country. As the natural world reduces to its most skeletal, and temperatures drop below freezing, we know the cold as they must have known it, as threat, as prolonged duration, as an ordeal to endure. Each day the death count grows. Despite the certainty that we, after sustained effort, succeeded in turning the ship of state around, we know that it will take months for our slow country to emerge from this deadly winter epilogue to four hostile years of ignorance, greed, neglect, and delusion. Not all of us will emerge. Only the fortunate among us will live to see better times, and to detest and revile the word “survivor.” We learn to undertake the work of mourning at a new pace, accelerated beyond what we would have thought possible, in order to overcome the forces, human and extra-human, that divide us from our nearest neighbor. In this wreckage, when some among us thrive on division and willfully spread disease and disinformation, assent to the real becomes an act of resistance.

The arts have a responsibility within such resistance and emergence. As Lin wrote, we must fashion an enormity of space around the subject, freeing the mind to move. How do we accomplish that? How do we interject distance between ourselves and this moment? We have at times the creative imperative to withdraw, to recede into a corner of freedom that remains intact if not undisturbed. We know the hibernating mind, the guarded wealth of the dormant seed. We learn to see ourselves as from a great distance, small figures on the earth’s surface, tracing our patterns, driven by our cares, dressed in the tissues of our words. Channel the mental choreography so the physical may follow.

I confess that I have at times held the obscene belief that I can write a way out of this disaster for all of us; that we collectively can dance our way out of it, or make a performance that will heal every malady of body, mind, and imagination, that will restore us and bring us together into a just world. We only need to find the form. In the vernacular of such dreams we think in an unthinkable world, or anyway in this unthinkable country, through the winter when we learn about tragedy, not through study but experience. In every moment we stay close to those thousands who have succumbed, whom the disaster has claimed. As winter becomes winter again, and the bewildering territory ices over, we understand that we have never really been lost before. There is an austere beauty to living in hell, to facing the void. We learn the simplest lessons again—that we cannot retain our sanity alone, that animals guide us, that children lead us. We wait while the doctors, specialists, and workers of the state, persist in their exhausting labor and bring us around with the distribution of their medicines. We hold what we can, and listen more closely. In our condition of hyperreceptivity we chronicle our mundane hours so our grandchildren’s children may know us. This is how we lived that winter. We taught our lessons, each one a nearly imperceptible crease on a vast surface of suffering. We learned every hour about sacrifice, and out of each sacrifice a resource welled up and lifted us. The wind would rage, and every morning we gave thanks that we saw another sunrise.

This has become our work now. Let it keep us as whole as we can expect, as durable and delicate as a construction of paper and string, as close to one another as the flickering screens allow—a vigil through this longest, darkest, coldest season.

Matthew Goulish, dramaturg and writer
Every house has a door