Dear friends and supporters,

On Tuesday September 5th the first performance of our latest work The Fossil Record opened the New Performance Turku Festival in Finland. This performance continues our Carnival of the Animals series of collaborations with Finnish textile artist Essi Kausalainen. We will present it in Chicago at Link’s Hall on October 26, 28, and 29, with a lecture by director Lin Hixson, Essi Kausalainen and me on the 27th. Chicago performers Elise Cowin, Kenya Kao Ra Zen Fulton, and Bryan Saner, as well as Essi and myself, appear in The Fossil Record. In Turku, the cast included clarinet player Julia Rima and young people Ahti Leppänen, Etna Ruscica and Villa Ruscica. Clarinetist Emily Manheimer and Poppy Booth, Leila Ashrafi, and Isaac Cresswell will appear in the Chicago performances.

On September 7th, Lin, Essi and I presented a ten-minute collaboratively composed artist talk in response to questions posed by Leena Kela, one of the Festival curators. For this newsletter we present the text of that talk and a live recording of its presentation in Turku, with deepest thanks to all involved.

Matthew Goulish, dramaturg

Matthew: In January of 2018 our performance Scarecrow was coming to an end. Lin and I had collaborated with Essi for the first time, working at a residency in Florida, performing in Helsinki and Prague and then Chicago. Scarecrow inhabited circuits of human-non-human communication. Essi’s signature lightweight textiles, materials, and performer-specific clothing intertwined with Lin’s collaborative choreography. I assembled texts for bilingual presentation by performers aged 6 through 11. We had only begun to investigate these shared concerns and strategies, to understand how they shifted the grammars of performance as we had known it.

I asked for a café meeting in Prague. There I presented Lin and Essi with the 14 movements of Camille Saint-Säens’s 1886 musical suite for children, The Carnival of the Animals: Introduction and Royal March of the Lion / Hens and Roosters / Wild Donkeys (Swift Animals) / Tortoises / The Elephant / Kangaroos / Aquarium / Characters with Long Ears / The Cuckoo in the Depths of the Woods / Aviary / Pianists / Fossils / The Swan / Finale

I proposed that we make a corresponding performance for each title, upgrading the materials to concern themselves with the endangered and extinct, contemporizing the vaguely colonial attitude infusing the French Romantic era but retaining the imaginative categories  sensible to children. In the Garden of Eden, the legend goes, Adam saw the animals before he named them. In most educational settings, teachers ask students to name the animals before they see them. The Carnival categories reflect the ungrounding effect of learning. A historian had noted how original performances involved  “musicians wearing masks of the heads of the various animals they represented.” A review applauded the music’s “buffoonery, grace and science”—a phrase like philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s proposal to move “from science to dream and back again.” Our project would guarantee that we continue to collaborate for an indefinite period, perhaps endlessly, and create a cycle of performances.

The pandemic soon interrupted this grand scheme. Our Aquarium mutated into Broken Aquarium. We recognized the need to warp each movement as we encountered it in accordance with our particularities of investment. Swan became Anti-Swan, a swimming green snake after a passage by American writer Ralph Ellison recalling his youth in Oklahoma. Fossils became The Fossil Record, combining the last five movements in a human meditation on resurrection. We have so much still to learn of and in these carnival years.

Essi: Fossil Record is a stage work for nine performers and textiles. We premiered it in the Turku City Theatre two nights ago. These nine performing bodies include the dramaturg and the textile maker, who are part of the ensemble. In addition to these nine, there is a director, a tech wizard and a company manager. There are parents and kids, and a dog. From Chicago, Joensuu, Espoo and Helsinki. A Carnival indeed.

Three years ago this seemed like a very unlikely scenario. Not only did it seem like an impossible thing to execute, it seemed like an impossible thing to dream about. Three years ago the pandemic broke our carefully woven pattern of coming together: of thinking, traveling, walking and eating together.

In my experience a breaking point is a point of shock, and potential trauma. It is also an opening. When fumbling through the ever shifting pandemic folds, we found a sleeve. And into this sleeve, our collective body grew a new limb. It evolved from a creative directive Lin gave us. Us, meaning the working group of the performance that never premiered. We made small performances into photographs, meeting each others in these obscure fragments. Imagining their surroundings. Then, we moved on to make films and a garage at the Hoyne Avenue was transitioned into a studio. 

While the Chicago end was working with careful choreographies of closeness and distance—and the movement of air—I was creating textures, body parts, layers and extensions in Helsinki, sewing as my way of being-with. Sending these fragments and isolated parts, like love letters, across the ocean to connect with the performing bodies in distance.

The pandemic broke our pattern, but we are breaking it constantly anyways. Sometimes making a large scale stage work with nine people. Sometimes making a napkin. The performance we just premiered started as a solo for one skeleton, danced by Bryan and accompanied by a clarinetist and two readers. Very early on, the piece informed us otherwise. It grew very organically into its shape, leading us to the place we are today. 

Fossil Record is the first collaborative live performance we made together after the pandemic. Created with a heightened sensibility to, and appreciation of, the live in performance, the materiality of these particular people, their bodies, their presence. And a new take on possible and impossible. How this all, how the performance itself, alters the future, we will find out as we go.

Lin: Every house has a door, at its core, is three people—Matthew Goulish, Sarah Skaggs, and myself. We initiate projects, organize, finance, and oversee the company. Each performance project centers around an invited group of diverse, intergenerational artists, who are all experts in their own way. We ask them to co-devise the work by responding to a third thing, for example in this case Fossil Record. I mention thirdness because I feel it is important in understanding the dynamics of our process with its emphasis on creative permission and a sustainable ecology when making work. It is not centered on the individual but on the need to get out of the way in order to create and be in relation with others and other things, at least that is how I see my role as director. What exceeds the group when coming together, what is more-than us, becomes the performance. And that discovery always surprises me. The challenge comes from how to care for it, how to tend to it, to keep it dynamic, moving forward and open to the unknown. It is a delicate ecology and because of this we only work with one new member at a time with each project. 

Although the performance is a third thing and not the sum of its individual parts, it is composed of rare individuals who make this overabundance possible. Bryan—mover, master carpenter, activist and someone I have shared my creative life with for over twenty-seven years; Christine—lighting designer, performer, and new technologies augmenter and wizard;  Elise—movement artist and writer, always pushing toward the impossible; Julia—classically trained clarinetist who will try anything; Kenya – musician, poet, curator, boat captain and expander into all fields; Sarah—vision maker, astute administrator, and rehearsal stand-in. Ahti, Villa and Etna—two teenagers and an eight year old, who keep us present to every moment.

And Essi, who forms an adjacent core to Every house has a door, who has a deep understanding of the complex relations with other beings, situations, and environments and whose work as an artist is devoted to life-giving. 

This process of the more-than continues with the arrival of the audience and the amplification it brings with it, keeping the performance in motion, opening it again to the unknown.