Actors, maps, software theatre

I know I'm ready for actors when I drive around talking to them in my head. I've been giving silent Art Talks all week.

DREAM
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Last night I dreamed I had my first class. There were 40 actors, inner-city, with tons of men -- "Shakespeare!" -- women, babies, languages, countries, races, aliveness. It felt like The Commitments. I was excited. They were rowdy and willful -- a hard first day. I kept trying to clear the space, they kept filling it. There were two big rooms with a folding wall. At one point, I found three softly-blinking black women laying on beanbags in the back room. "YOU ARE ANGELS," I said. Fifteen people left early. At the end, I told everyone, "I HAVE SOMETHING REALLY GOOD FOR YOU... BUT ONLY IF YOU LISTEN & DO WHAT I SAY." They nodded, left, and I spent the rest of the night busily planning the next rehearsal -- only to wake and realize I will never see them again.

I feel bereft. I can still see those actors vividly. We never got to MAKE anything.

REAL LIFE
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Nanda Devi last spring grew out of my compulsion for destruction-creation, my resonance to the Himalayas.

This fall, I'm all about maps. I feel like if I can just draw the right picture of my life, my future, I can go get it. It's an on-the-brink feeling. Even in this blog, most recent pictures are of maps. My kitchen table has over 50 cut-out pictures of maps on it.

A map is a visual representation, an algorithm. If you think about it, Danny Hillis's Connection Machine -- whose millions of tiny computers made possible simulations of turbulence, waves, oil flow -- was a realtime map-maker.

I miss computer science. The hard problems, entrepreneurship, and swift thinking. The pure and applied inventiveness. The vivid skillfulness with models. I miss my tribe. I always felt like a member without a skill -- like in that telepath book, the woman whose psi powers registered strongly on the meter, but they could never discover what her Gift was. Turns out her Gift was Gene Dancing -- they found when she got pregnant, that she could alter the DNA of unborn children.

Theatre is the first form I have found to express my Gift. I am searching for how to merge it with the sheer intellectual horsepower and magnitude of computer science. Maybe I need a software theatre. I wonder what that is.

If only I had the right map.