Akropolis retrospective, introspective

I saw Akropolis twice last week; Friday, and their Sunday closing show. Sunday was the best of the run -- hot, loose, whole new worlds of meaning, all three performers broken through to a new level. I was hearing lines I'd never heard before.

Friday, on the other hand, was one of those didn't-quite-click days. Unlike most plays, where, even if it's not clicking that night, you can still have a decent ride on the plot -- here, the clicking IS the play. Without it, Dream felt like strings and sticks, with no illumination. I found myself wondering, "WAS it good before? Or has it always been like this and I was just deceiving myself?" Then Sunday, when it blazed forth as molten white-light, better and stronger than ever, I realized, "No, I was not mistaken. It's like fire: it's either lit or it's not. If it's lit, there's a whole range of hotness."

The intimacy was what had broken through to a new level Sunday. Jennifer was intimate with the notes -- they came absolutely soft, from nowhere. The players were intimate with each other, and with their movement scores. The wild thing about Akropolis, the true thing is -- there is no limit to their intimacy potential, and yet they remain strangers. In this, they are beginning to resemble the Odin, and Leonid's company -- great moons. Sunday was a whole new place of intimacy -- softness, abandon, trust, desperation, surrender -- almost in the realm of lovers, and yet, like lovers, strangers.

When I make devised theatre, I create intimacy first, then evolve the form that reflects that. They create form first, then find the intimacy within it. It doesn't matter; either journey will take you all the way.

But eventually, everything has to be all the way -- the form has to be all the way truthful, and the actors living within it must be as well.

I notice in myself, that if I am processing something big, I sometimes get sick. My body has to purge, or shut down, to handle that amount of information. I feel like the actors in this show had gotten just beyond the sickness; that if they had two more weeks of the run, the show would have broken through into something else entirely.

Vulnerability. That's what was finally beginning to tremble into being, just as it closed.

We must walk off the cliff. Wherever the edge of the cliff is tonight, find it and leap. The leap might kill you. In that leap is the living.

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Robyn Hunt, a Suzuki-lineage holder and my teacher, says, "Actors need to be watched." Sometimes I wonder what it would do for Akropolis to have the size of crowds that generate heat and power. On the other hand, sometimes I think they only need to be witnessed; to know themselves in the danger-light of a single watcher is enough to send them careening toward madness.

Under all this, it is probably myself that wants to be more vulnerable and more intimate, to leap off the cliff, to know myself witnessed.

In Improv Saturday, we had were only three actors. The same number I had at the Odin. And the same calibre -- strong, smart, willing, limitless. I am ready to work with only this level of actor. Commitment. That is another similarity between Akropolis and myself: to others, we appear extremely committed. But inside, we know there is a whole other level of commitment that is possible, and coming.