To begin with I want to say, that all these things are already changed and invalid. There is no certainty at all because this is partly based on my own memory. So, for my brain, this is a moment in time, as many others that will follow - it will disappear from direct approachability. But maybe, just maybe it'll leave a trace in the liminal parts of your frontal cortex. Or not at all. Thank you for your time anyway. :)
In this essay I am trying to narrate my own artistic process: from "therapeutic" methods and approaches of text creation, which put personal storytelling to the foreground, either by writing yourself or co-writing in collective processes, towards "empathic" pieces of theatre or performance art that transcend to the political from the personal. Because I work in an ephemeral art form, the performative, my shows can't be really captured. There is video recording (but that's never the real thing), I do have the texts for the shows I have written, and I do have some of the audio recordings that were made in rehearsals (but who listens to
those). They are not ordered for an investigation, they are in chaos, so that at one point I can stumble upon them again and be inspired (a story I like to tell myself). Instead of on evidence, I choose to rely on my own memory, really dwell in it, in the moments that re-appear when I think about the two words "therapeutic" and "empathic", that have been following me around, for sure since I started working at Maxim Gorki Theater in 2014, but probably even before, with the first two shows I did, from which I definitely remember that I desperately wanted to have "real people" talk on stage. Honestly, I am trying to remind myself what
happened to me in the last years, what pathways I followed by accidently living.