What I love about theatre, part 1

I am speaking in relation to creating the kind of theatre that most touches me, ensemble theatre in the Polish/Russian tradition.

What I love about theatre is that it's as big as I am. As limitless, as voracious for truth and tenderness and beauty and glory and brutality and silence and stillness and little laughters and light. It touches and kisses and slams and sleeps and walks and luminesces. It O Splendors and sings.

I love that it uses all my gifts, and asks for more. I am good at writing and art and acting and choreography and music and improv and composition and fighting and dancing and speaking in tongues and mask and costume and languages and metaphor and story and poetry and groupwork and group incendiariness and transformation and greatness -- and theatre uses ALL of those.

I love that in a good theatre piece -- which I have seen fewer than 5 of in my life -- a resonance builds and shudders and breaks you open, until the winds blow through and tenderize you.

It is the same heart as spirituality, as mother & child, as lovers.

I love the sensuality, the asceticism, the rigor, the discipline, the severity, the playfulness, the dream, the great slow truths.

I love that it walks in both worlds, the mortal and the spiritual, and even a third one which cannot be named or controlled, but sometimes evanesces into being.

I love that it requires me to be an original artist AND a group artist.

It can shock. It is a vehicle for group greatness. That same chaotic unbridled force that is a mob -- that is delicious about being in an out-of-control mob -- courses through theatre. Pagan, terrifying, uncontrollable.

It's dangerous. It's real. It's alive. It absolutely forbids anything but greater and greater truth.

Theatre is a tiger.

It is the limitless lover, the long highway, the plain embrace.

Theatre is communion with god. I feel in adoration with the Divine when I do theatre.