To Sleep Perchance to Dream

As a teacher, every summer about this time, I stand on the threshold of a new school year, partly filled with anticipation, anxiety, excitement, and a tinge of dread. Every school year is different. Every school year presents a new set of challenges and a new combination of students. The line between the nervous anticipation of beginning and the desperate desire to cling to my summer freedom becomes increasingly visceral. A controlled panic begins to set in.

There on my desk sit two scripts of plays I will be directing; Dead Man Walking and Children of Eden. These scripts represent a significant chunk of my life for the next ten months. Once I open those texts and dive into their all consuming depths I know that that they will dominate my creative energies, set my heart a blaze and my mind to restless sleeplessness.

The sleeplessness is not actually insomnia. It is a creative space in which a magic alchemy of ideas and inspiration occur. It is as if my very being merges with the creative process and becomes one with it.
In this dream-like state, my subconscious has been known to stage entire production numbers.

Yesterday, I spent my entire day in what will shortly be my new artistic home at Santa Margarita Catholic High School. Within the four walls of the black box theatre, I sorted and organized costumes and props. I separated shirts from blouses and skirts from dresses, matched shoes, and boxed boas. All the while the black walls of this room were silently penetrating me. I was passively becoming familiar with the theatre. A lectio-divina-like experience -only rather than with scripture - with a performance space. The process of savoring, meditating, and developing a relationship with scripture is similar to the process a director goes through with a theatre space. I will spend countless hours in this dark, black, dream-like universe where the imagination alone will transform and transcend. It is mysterious. It is spiritual. It brings me closer to God.

It is Peter Brooke's Empty Space. It is Robert Edmund Jones' Dramatic Imagination. It is infinite. It is where my self and my creative energies will merge and the alchemy will begin. It is my gift.

Without cracking the script, last night as I slept, in my subconscious, those black walls breathed. They spoke to me and I saw and heard the opening of my fall production, Dead Man Walking. As I awoke, this morning, I knew that those hours spent yesterday were more valuable than merely accomplishing an organizational task. It was sacred time. The artist, the self, the work, and the space have merged. We are one.

My dread and anxiety over beginning has transformed into creative energy. The script on my desk, no longer a dreaded, lifeless project, passionately calls to me. The blessed unrest that Martha Graham speaks of has begun. It is Theatre on Purpose.