Not Just Your Poster Sentiment

August 11, 2018

Four countries. Five journeys. Six nationalities.  My theatre experiences in the first half of this year have been varied and widespread.  From middle schoolers in the Marshall Islands to college students in American Samoa to a mixed, extended family on Pohnpei to artists from three countries in India, they and I have communicated through multiple languages, music, pantomime and created theatre reflective of personal experience, community understanding and cultural respect.  And it all felt so very … common.  Not common in the unexciting sense.  Not at all.  Common in the sense of ‘this is what I do and who I am.’  Despite, or maybe because of, traveling to places both unfamiliar and acutely familiar, comfortable even in the discomfort, I have never once felt a stranger in an unknown place.  I’ve simply felt as though I’ve had some very long commutes, not the least because in every place I visited, even one I’ve never been to and one I’ve rarely visited, I ended up working or interacting with people I previously worked with.

Here in the midst of my second trip to American Samoa this year, I think of how small the world has become.  One day I’ll drive up the road for 7 minutes to work in a school that I have long partnered with.  And then the next week I’ll be across the ocean or the globe, diving into a new theatre-based project that brings me together with old colleagues and newly found friends.  Few people I know experience the breadth of the work I am lucky to do, and that includes even myself!  Traveling to some of these places I hear about a play I helped develop being performed here or there.  Magically, my experience widens beyond even my physical ability to be present.  How lovely is that!

The joy, the true joy, however, exists well beyond the theatrical presentations, the accomplishments of the trainings, realizing that my work lives in so many nooks and crannies around the world or even the touching farewell parties.  The joy to which I refer comes from walking into a room thousands of miles from my home, or maybe just hundreds of feet from my home, and being greeted with a simple good morning. Not the surprise of seeing each other again, or the thrill of newly meeting, but the comfortable feeling of sharing a space once again with people that maybe I haven’t seen in years, but feel more like family than colleagues.

I love the hoopla of theatre, but embrace the warmth of a trusting, supportive relationship that exists beyond time and place.  It’s deeply satisfying to have that in many locations, languages, and cultures with many ages, personalities, personal experiences, backgrounds and outlooks on life.  Theatre has brought me and my friends together across these many divides, but it is the simple joy of daily interactions that tie us together.

I am afraid I am sound like one of those inspirational posters. But for me its not the poster sentiment, its all of those lovely people.