We don't know what we're making

We don't know what we're making when we're making it. We don't know what we've made when we are done. Even those watching sometimes cannot see what we have made -- they can only feel their own reactions to it.

The Odin's Anderson was of the same shimmering density as Kama Ginkas's Chekhov -- Rothschild's Fiddle -- or Leonid Anisimov's Lower Depths. Soft supple master actors, and shining layers of reality piled up and vibrating until without noticing you are inside the poem; you have become the haunting.

The whole thing cracks, and you with it. This happens in many Odin pieces. It's not a conscious, or consciously constructed thing. It is the result of many truths. The first several jar you from your surety, then one detail jolts you agape. You are like a door, swinging on its hinges -- and then you have no door.

There was no happy ending. "And no tragic one either," said Eugenio. This is a formidable accomplishment. I felt echoes of Hans Christian's loneliness -- or mine. There were explosions of stillness where I could breathe. Snow. A sound like boulders singing. Trees scraping their branches. A man with Kantorian repetitiveness, swinging, swinging, kicking his knees and swinging.

But mostly, there was that vibration and sundering that means the piece has broken you tender. You know it's a woman in a red dress with a white mask and a mandolin, and yet the third time she passes, she's the only real thing in the space -- neither the walls, nor the spectators, nor you yourself are real, compared to that lost planet, lost fragment of time, which orbits singing.

They say that children who have known loss draw trees with holes in them. I think Eugenio has people being shot for the same reason -- it feels actual.

It was a fractal. The whole play felt like Andersen, and each of its pieces came from his stories. Same with Chekhov -- his moments and his plays feel like his life.

And then there were the deeper reverberations because of the given circumstances -- the exoticism that comes with taking the play out of its home, and placing it in new surroundings. This only happens if you have shown your home faithfully.

"My wife left me," says the furrier in Lower Depths, "For another furrier who had better pelts."

Snow in Denmark is normal; in the Italian summer, it is exotic. The way the Odin sings in their own halls is usual; in an old church in Bergamo it is strange, untraceable. The way the zanni move their hands -- a motion that once was winding yarn, and now has become pure glyph -- echoes in our hindbrains.

At one point an actor on top of the end-bridge dropped a grenade into the snow-lit entrance. We all turned at the sound. It lay like a pine cone, inert, spotlit. The onstage actor addressed it, finished, left. Then a girl spectator leaned over and picked it up. It was not a grenade or a pine-cone after all -- nor even part of the performance. It was her cell-phone.

You could not think up all the things in Andersen. You could only discover them iteratively by doing.

What I noticed about the chapel across the street was how real each stone was. Someone decided to make a dome. Someone decided to make a line of small vertical bricks, this far apart, as the trim. Someone decided to put this stone here, and that one next to it. The moments of the Odin play were as precisely chosen as that chapel.

There is no blurriness in art -- only choice, far commitment, integrity. Art is the search; it is left to the observer to name, to infer, to interpret the metaphor which remains as a by-product of that search. "Every track ends, finally, with the skull," says Tom Brown, the Native-American-raised author of Tracker.

Truthful search leaves in its wake reverberation -- loose ends, associations, paradoxes unresolved, possibly undiscovered.

We don't know why Hans Christian kept making paper cut-outs. We just felt them suddenly splash over us, projected silhouettes on every wall and mirrored roof and floor, across our bodies and faces -- a hall of silent alleluia. No one ever explained. We just gazed, absorbed.

"Whatever you least expect, that is what will happen next," said R.A. MacAvoy out of the blue, a one-sentence paragraph in one of her books. It was the only time she spoke in that voice in the entire trilogy -- and even with that forewarning, what came next was unexpected.