Dear Animal,
This is my last letter to you, and it begins where I left off, Animal-on the far left coast of Canada, at that time of year when summer starts to turn and a new season is in the wings.
After time in Vancouver and on the Sunshine Coast, I crossed the Salish Sea and brought my family to Colin’s place, on Gambier Island. Gambier is such a big part of Colin, and my friendship with Colin is such a big part of me that I have been there to see him scores of times over the last two decades. There are many who visit him only in summer, but I’ve been there in all seasons. I distinctly remember a late-December visit, with a brand new baby, who, when we went from warm fire to sideways rain, shrieked the New Year into being.
This visit is in the Green Season, and I walk on the back 45 with Colin and my husband, Rob, and little Pinto, ever deeper into the moss. I have brought Colin Lobster Mushrooms from the Coast and we are seeding them, as we have been for a decade, and we never give up hope. Walkabout takes us back through the orchard and through the gardens. If you believe in Heaven, praise the Lord, you have arrived. If you believe in theatre, then leap to your feet, it is a glorious creation.
The season is summer, more specifically, berry time, and even more precisely, the micro-season of the mulberry tree. On Gambier a mulberry is a fat thumb of purple drupelets, nothing like the black smudge that mulberry meant where I grew up.
I have been on Gambier for mulberry season once before, 16 years ago, with that baby in a carrier.
I stood with him under the tree and he pointed to the berries. The mulberry branches hang low, and I lowered the branch so he could take one in his mouth, teaching him to suckle straight from the tree. I hoped to cultivate this green parentage so that it might be a primary synapse in his brain, so that even before he learned words, he might know the pure delight of that burst of sweet juice, his first summer on Earth.
This year the birds are getting most of the mulberries, and that baby, now almost 17 and 6’3, manages to reach a ripe one hidden in the leaves. But just one. What to do about the birds? Colin sighs. You can hang nets, but invariably birds get trapped, tangled, wounded. He is the production manager for the whole ecosystem now. So, my kids are left wanting mulberry jam and this year, the birds fly off with the harvest.
Before I make Colin out to be too saintly, I will say that I have known him to shoot raccoons that steal apples from the orchard, then throw the bandits into the compost. When Colin turns the compost, he digs up the skulls—this year’s collection is pictured above. My kids have Gambier raccoon skulls on their bookshelves in their Colorado rooms.
Returning to Gambier, Animal, I was shocked by how much I had forgotten. I had remembered the Mulberry trees but not the colour of the water, the squeak/bang of the screen door. Memory is a small pocket and Reality, impossibly large. There is shame in forgetting. How can I say I love this place? What kind of lover am I to have let go so much? I try to take everything with me.
The Gambier days pass quickly and then again, we cross the water, then cross the border heading back to the bars and stripes, ahem, the stars and stripes of these United States. When we were headed to Canada, the landscape rose up strange and beautiful, but now I see only blown-out tires and roadkill: the whole thing flat. We drive, but I drag, my personal parking brake left on.
America feels hostile and the handmade FUCK BIDEN signs in the grasslands don’t help. The shaking of the road is constant, and it gets to me. It is unbearably hot. So, I drive with the windows down, even on the highway, and the family talk, maybe to me, who knows, words whipped away. Where do they all end up, those words? Is there a corner of the world that catches them, the lost and found of language, full of broken promises, fragments, words that fell apart, a heap of tangled consonants, the odd ‘o’ rolling away. I am without words. Canada retreats from the rearview mirror. ‘Here’ is lost in ‘there’. I squint into the sun and keep my eyes on the broken line. What a state I am in.
What state am I in? One where the hot sauce comes as hand grenades. Yeah. What did I say about shaking? Must be getting close to home.
I step out of the car, finally, and feel my feet upon the earth, the broken clay. In Latin, ‘humus’ is an ancient word for ‘soil’ but it also came to mean ‘human’ . It is what we are, what I am, ‘humi’ – ‘on the ground’. An even older root word is ‘’dhghem’ or ‘earth’ which means both ‘human’ and ‘home’. It’s where we get the word ‘humility’, and ‘humour’. So then, to bring an ancient word and root and meaning all together in a headline: Human Steps from Car onto Earth and Is Home.
Home is where I make things, and the first thing to make is a trip up the hill and see what happened in the garden while I was away. I have the fecundity of Colin’s garden in my mind.
Still, it is not a disappointment to find the borage has grown and flowered. I first tasted a borage petal in the garden on Gambier. Every borage is related to every other, and now I have it growing here, on a Colorado mountain top. It is a good companion for the strawberries.
The flow is slow through the hose at the top of the garden, and I sit for a long time and water. The ever-bearing strawberries give up just one–the cold nights have slowed them. But the Caroline Raspberry had a growth spurt. The cilantro is going to seed, and I nibble the bead of flavour. The bush beans I transplanted did not grow any taller–I suppose because of the onslaught of wind–but each one produced a few wee pods. There will be green bean casserole for the doll house tonight.
I walk the dog early in the morning before the heat of the day. The chokecherries along the road are turning black. There is so little fruit and so many birds and beasts that might be hungry, I pick sparingly. Once home I add water and boil them down while I work at the table. The smell stirs me, sharp cherry in the air. I line a colander with cheesecloth and press out the juice. It is startling, thick and viscous. I feel like I have hit a vein.
A year ago, I was not able to grow food here, or find it growing wild. I couldn’t make theatre here, far from you Animal, far from collaborators, funding, and inspiration of the land I loved. Hearing applause in the clacking of the grasshoppers, I concluded, ruefully, that this was my audience now, and I didn’t think I would ever make theatre again.
I spent much of this year torn between worlds, as if love for one displaced the other. But that has changed—I don’t know how it happened, I broke, or yielded, or filled myself up with the rainforest on my trip, but arriving back there is a shift. There is no separation between worlds. Everything touches everything else. A swirl in the mud is the curl of a fern. The mountain is upside down in the water. Word is both sound and silence. Ripples come to the shore and to the far side of the lake. I’m not without. I find the sea in the sky.
What will I make of this new season?
In years past, with you, Animal, we curated elemental seasons with themes like Forests, with tinkers as the main show, but 10 others, like Sticks & Stones, the educational program, the ancillary events, and the fundraiser. All the art came from this central exploration of theme.
The work to create a season in the theatre, I believe, is to understand your artistic curiosity, and plant ideas into it for specific shows, then tend their growth through a season, be it 2 or 10. The path to production is unpredictable. There are many who contribute of course; theatre is a deeply collaborative form. Creating a season is a work of vision, sure, but it also asks for tenacity, belief that there IS a way to bring it into being. Then, add time. In this way, many impossible things have come into the world between us, Animal…
Before COVID hit, I was mulling over a season called Home. I saw it as performances in and around houses, and included the hand- building of a house as a community. (Shelter, I still love that idea) It dug into the domestic, everyday micro stages where one, hopefully, blissfully, makes oneself at home. I think there is a lot of theatrical potential in a season curated around Home. And in my own life, this past year, dear Animal, I inadvertently programmed that.
Last season, I produced a new world for my children. My youngest befriended a blind horse named Betts, adopted a dog, and became a cat-care assistant at the Humane Society. He discovered for himself that his future is not as a vet, which is what everyone will suggest, but rather in animal care or animal rescue.
But the most dramatic action came just a few days ago, at school orientation, where, after a year of staying stubbornly to himself (or running away, or fighting like hell), I found him chatting and exuberant in a circle of friends. Read that last phrase again, ‘in a circle of friends’. You can’t say it loud enough, your chest can’t rumble thunderously enough for you to experience the enormity of what that means. To me. To him.
Meanwhile, his big brother is headed into filmmaking and has made two films in Colorado, both stories of himself in relationship with landscape. The apple, it appears, fell not far from the tree then promptly rolled to the wall and plugged itself in. For the next five months I’ll watch him apply for film programs in his two nations, both of which he calls home. The last season before he leaves…
As a last hurrah before his final year of high school starts, my eldest and I take a class in ring making. Whereas I struggle to even see the tiny marks of the chasing hammer, my son gets it and immediately begins to innovate. He deftly wields the bushy blue flame that melts the solder and moves it away, the moment the glow of gold turns pink. The first day of school he shows his ring to a classmate who admires his creation and says he should make more. A small production of joy.
Oh yes, and, last season, I produced small, beloved, family member (no, not a house cow…yet). I’ve turned a house into a home, which, sure, could double as a plant store, with the surfeit of light borrowed every day from the Colorado sky.
And, by now, I have learned enough to feed my family a little of the soil and sun. I produced a canning shelf full of the manna of this land, green apples, rhubarb, pine, zucchini, chokecherry, hops, and juniper. I researched how to forage cattail pollen. The garden came forth from a hillside of grass, and the flower beds too, the visions of future seasons with an orchard, and chickens, maybe pigs. Oh, I do like impossible things.
Speaking of which, I am very pleased to say that I am part of a company again. It is one I co-founded in 2019, in xwesam/Roberts Creek, and this year actively rejoined as a creative. Living Forest Institute’s vision is to connect every member of the community to their local natural forests inspiring action and preservation, and it sees art as the means of connection. I have worked using art to save those forests since 2015 and couldn’t give it up, so I’m joining my three dear friends at LFI to launch a suite of art projects on the Sunshine Coast this season.
Also, last season I got my first job as a filmmaker and wrote and co-directed four short films which will soon be released for an institution in Vancouver. They have not yet announced the opening of this project ( I’ll say more when I can). I slowly found my way into the form, made a little magic, and worked with people I love, on a site that intrigued me. It was a joyful making.
Finally, I authored this year of letters to you, dear Animal, over 50,000 words, which is the size of a small novel, or a big heartache, or both. I tried, in those letters, to say goodbye to the theatre, but, it was something in the end that I could not throw away, because even when I tried, the theatre, boomerang-like, landed back in my hands. Dear Animal was like my sketchbook through a year on the land, and this month, as I wrap it up, I read through.There, I found a new season.
So, unlikely as it is, here is the season launch of Force of Nature. It is a year of experiments on land I love that centre the awesome, elemental power of the natural world. It stars animal, vegetable and mineral. It responds to weather and landscape. It is the theatre of non-human world. For the audience, I hope it is an invitation to become more fluent in the ineffable language of Life. Some ideas belong to this place, Sunshine, some can only happen on the Sunshine Coast, and some will take root, I hope, in both places at once. Force of Nature features a dozen shows I’ll work on this year, pretty much one a month. Why so many? Well, often these shows belong to specific micro-seasons, when the wind hits the snowdrifts, when the wildfire danger is high, when the wildflowers bloom, and, as artistic collaborator and audience, we are on their time. At times, they are big ideas that need years to develop and create, but want to get going. I tried to make the season modest, but Nature had its say, and as you know, it asks a lot from us. So here, for your reading pleasure is the season to come…
Force of Nature
SEPTEMBER: Theatre of Landscape: an interactive workshop for residents of Sunshine at Fall Festival (Sunshine), and book launch for All Good Things Must Begin, including my piece, This Play, produced by Climate Change Theatre Action (NYC)
OCTOBER: 1000 Year Theatre (excerpt): opening for a year-long run at Canadian Museum of Nature in an exhibit for winners of David Suzuki Foundation National Rewilding Award (Ottawa)
NOVEMBER: ‘Not Yet Announced’: four short films opening at a local institution (Vancouver)
DECEMBER: Gold-Plated: a six-course dinner featuring local foods, curated on the theme of excavation. Sunshine was founded as a Gold Rush town, and both pioneer and closed-down commercial mines dot the town. How do we reckon with that history of extraction, and find gold now? It starts with a party. Each course is interwoven with the stories from the town of Sunshine that are pure gold. (Sunshine)
JANUARY: Six Kinds of Silence: sculptural collaborations between snow and wind and the stories that emerge as the forms melt away (Sunshine)
FEBRUARY: Desire Paths: a perambulatory piece in the snow, following the tracks of deer, fox, and rabbit, and the narratives they weave through the landscape (Sunshine)
MARCH: Surefire: a show for combustible times that looks at the flash point of both human hot-headedness and the scourge of wildfires and what might cool things down (Sunshine & Sunshine Coast)
APRIL: When Pigs Fly: seeding a decade-long work to restore damaged land, using regenerative agriculture methods and, of course, theatre. (Sunshine Coast & Sunshine)
MAY: Puppet Soup: a farmer’s market puppet show using each week’s local produce as the medium for puppets (Boulder & Sunshine Coast)
JUNE: Bear BnB: with Living Forest Institute, an interspecies housing experiment in old-growth yellow cedar stumps (Sunshine Coast)
JULY: a half mile closer to the moon: a combo of wildflower concerts and diminutive wildflower stages, within a high-altitude theatrical mountain ascent (Sunshine)
AUGUST: Cloud Nine: where the sky is the theatre, and your seat is flat on your back, look up at the theatricality of flying water (Sunshine)
Our venues are varied, but, often we will meet at the Sunshine Schoolhouse and trek to our sites from there. The Schoolhouse has a pot-bellied wood stove, and it’s part of the show to gather there after for hot drinks made with Chokecherry Syrup or a treat like a Pine Mugolio Sno-cone. After all, what better epilogue could there be to Force of Nature than to eat the trees?
Honestly, the season has been tough to finalize. Perhaps there are too many ideas to produce in full. When we worked together, Animal, I always programmed nine things in the season. There were underpinnings of that that were about funding, I always thought…but no, I just like doing nine things at once. The work thrives in the cross-pollination, and sometimes ideas fold into each other and one show lives within another, like a map spread out on the table that can, with patience, fit into your pocket. I’m a young producer in this town so partnerships, funding, viability–all unknowns. Well, whatever. At least one of the mountains I live on is made of trust.
When I posted about moving here, an old friend who loves Boulder sent me the DM above. ‘Get to know everyone’ is my production model. Beyond a few local theatre companies, I am not sure who I will collaborate with, but I’ll still talk to Colin. I’ll call and he will probably answer with that resigned sigh, ‘Whaaaat?’ Ideas need physical form, and this is what Colin’s mastery is. There is no idea of mine that has ever met an audience without a thousand questions between me and Colin. So, at the end of this season, I hope we will have experiments in form and text and image for each of the projects, and, of course, documentation. Tis the season…and I’m so happy that it has arrived.
I’m still dreaming of taking the Artist Brigade national, still hearing dialogue for Museum of Rain, I know there is a Theatre of Rock, a Teacup Puzzle, and a show about local colour called ‘Barn Swallow Belly’. There is a Rain Piano contraption in my head. There is Junior Astronaut Juice, a show set in a convenience store like a post-consumer particle collider, that ends with transcendence. And, if there is a sustainable way forward, I’m still into Bouncy Castle Hamlet which I have been thinking about for years. Ideas are as quick to arrive as they are long-lived. It is a nice problem to have.
My eyes are open to the everyday beauty of this world, like what you see in the photo here, when I went to retrieve Pinto’s ball from the ditch. I don’t know if I could have gotten to this relationship with beauty, or to this launch, Animal, without writing to you. But I have arrived, and it is a new season, and I will miss you in the making of it.
To try to find an ending to this letter, I turned back to the poem, the only animal, which lent you its name. I had forgotten that the poem is really about suicide and the question of how to go on. The form of this poem is a conversation with a being who has universal knowledge, like you, Animal. Twenty years ago, I had different questions, and still the poem was an answer, then and now. Here is an excerpt.
“this morningI stood once again
in this world, the garden
ark and vacant
tomb of what
I can’t imagine,
between twin eternities
more or less equidistantly
exiled from both,
hovering in the dreaming called
being awake, where
You gave me
in secret one thing
to perceive, the
tall blue starry
strangeness of being
here at all.
You gave us each in secret something to
perceive.
Furless now, upright, My banished
and experimental
child
You said, though your own heart condemn you
I do not condemn you.“
–excerpt from ‘the only animal’, a poem by Franz Wright
I’m writing this outside at night. The stars come out. I stay for a while, and when I go to bed, night will become dawn, and the stars, which never actually disappear, will be lost again. There are many such illusions of things vanishing. And, illusion or not, this is the end of this letter, the end of this commission, the end of this year writing to you. I’m grateful to Barbara for this opportunity to share my story of falling in love with a new land. Although now I think that was a false pursuit, which you, The Only Animal, must have known all along. New land? No. The Only Land. There is this and that, and here and there, now and then, but in all the change there is a constant, which I will call the ‘tall blue starry strangeness’. You live there, Animal, in all your multitudes: ideas and shows and work and friends and audiences and beauty and laughter, and wild theatrical adventures we have had and those that await you now. Nothing that is forged in love can ever come asunder, and dearly and deeply, Animal, I love you, even as I say goodbye. As for my species, the only animal who can make it complicated, I leave you with what I have learned from this year: that ‘new’ is not land. Neither does ‘new’ apply to humans. Like the first show I ever wrote, The One that Got Away said, there are only seven people in the world–you just meet them over and over again. Land isn’t new, and humans aren’t either. And love, even between a human and muse, is an eternal force, isn’t it?
There is something new, though. New is this moment, now, where we lean into the future and fall forward into the unknown. This newness is the theatre. Where everything is possible.
Goodbye, my dear friend,
Kendra
All photos by the author, except Franz Wright’s poem, ‘The Only Animal’ from the New Yorker, March 2003, the still from the short film 91.7 Mountain FM by Larkin Fanconi Miller, the bouncy castle photo, from Barclays TV advert, 2011; Living Forest Institute website page, designed by Kevin Broome of wallonthefly, and the last photo of yours truly, by my husband, Rob Rupert