It Is What It Is.

In the end, though, it doesn't matter whether New York was a toxic prison or spiritual haven or both.  It's New York.  It simply is.

One of my favorite books is the Time Traveler's Wife (trust me, it's nothing like the Nicholas Sparks knock-off the movie makes it out to be).  In it, the two lovers, Clare and Henry are madly and passionately devoted to one another.  But I remember thinking that despite their purity of their love, the two seemed incapable of doing anything but making the other inadvertently miserable.  You can't help but wonder, as you read the book, if perhaps they both wouldn't have been better off if they had just never gotten involved with one another.  But then you have to ask yourself, when would they have made that choice?  Because of the circularity of his time travel, when Henry meets Clare for the first time, she's already in love with him.  And when she meets him as a child, he's already married to her.  There really was no beginning to their love.  They love each other because they've always loved each other. 

Likewise, there's no qualifying my love of New York City.  It simply is.  I asked myself for a long time, "Why do I love this place so much?  Why do I stay here?"  It's dirty and it's loud, it's expensive and it's hard.  And though there are a lot of answers you can give to that question - the theater, the museums, the food, the people - none of them were strong enough reasons to explain why I was there.  And then I realized: I love New York because I've always loved New York. 

For a long time, I thought fell in love with the after a vacation with my family when I was 12.  It was only a 2-day trip, but it seemed like every day I lived in the interim, from age 12 to age 18, was spent with a yearning and determination to get back to New York City.

So when I finally came to New York for college, I was already in love.  I loved the city because I could remember being knocked breathless by it as an adolescent, so many years ago.  But I think, when I fell so hard the first time I visited, it was because I could already see myself there.  I could imagine my life in New York City, working and struggling and making and seeing amazing art because I was compelled - because there was nothing greater. 

I love New York now because I can remember myself then, at 12, loving it so much.  But I loved it at 12 because I could see myself now, at 27 still loving the city, still bound to it.  There is no beginning and no end to my love of New York.  It's always existed.  It simply is.  

Closing Doors

On Saturday, September 25th, I shut the door and switched off the lights for the very last time in the place I've called my home for the past four and a half years.

After we left, Andrew and I stood on my roof quietly for a moment, watching the lights of Harlem twinkle in through the dark patches created from the neighborhood's newly-constructed high-rise condos. 

My roof.  I had my 25th birthday party up here.  I brought up milk crates, and we sat on them in the glow of a string of twinkle lights and some cheap tap-lights from the 99-cent store.  I brought my sisters up here to watch the fireworks on the 4th of July that they visited.  I drank beers here on a blanket with my best friends.  I did yoga up here.  We kissed up here once, on a grey day after we saw St. John's Cathedral.  In the dark I could still see its massive silhouette on the hill, stacked on top of us. 

"I've never left something so permanently before," I told him.  "Really?" Andrew said.  I kissed him again, like I did on that grey day, and we went back downstairs.

Since leaving, I've experienced a curious mixture of grief and elation.  Sometimes I'm struck so intensely by the strangeness and the sadness of the fact that I'll never again enter that room, with its bare window, cheap Ikea daybed and the TV tray doubling as a nightstand.  Other times, I think about the fact that I'm utterly unattached, unbeholden to that space, to its particular dust and clutter, its mice and its rent - and the thought makes me giddy. 

I always meant to buy curtains, replace the TV tray with a real nightstand, but somehow never got around to it.  It wasn't a priority.  During my tenure in NY, I encouraged in myself a sort of monk-like asceticism; I had neither the money nor the space for a lot of stuff.  But as I shut the door on on my room for the last time, a thought came to me, spontaneously and unbidden: never again.

Never again do I want to live so impermanently, in the empty expanse of a space I always meant to make my own.  Never again do I want to live the the shadow of promises I've made to myself. 

It's funny.  Through my self-imposed asceticism, I thought I was cultivating an appropriately monastic spirituality.  New York, I thought to myself, was teaching me how to detach from materialism.  I thought about the spiritual lessons New York was teaching me a lot.  Patience.  The value of hard work. 

In hindsight, though, I wonder if these things that I thought were teaching were actually tearing down: all those moments waiting for a subway or walking behind someone slow were wearing down my patience to a tiny, raw, nub.  All the times I had to work so much harder for what I wanted than I would have anywhere else... maybe it just made me tired.  And I wonder if my bare personal space actually set me adrift in some way.  I wonder if we need things in the same way we need stories - to tie us down, to tell us who we are.

I go back and forth like this, wondering if New York strengthened me or unmoored me - or maybe both.  I guess I'm about to find out.

The Benefits of Twitter, Part 2

Slowly but surely, I'm coming out of my fog and getting back into my old groove. The first loose end I want to tie up here: finishing my little manifesto on Twitter.  A little over a month ago, I started talking about why Twitter is awesome, and I found had so much to say that I couldn't finish.  But so much that has been so illuminating should not go unsaid.  So, to say that Twitter changed my perspective would not be saying enough.  Without question, it changed my understanding of what the word networking meant, and my intention in seeking an artistic community.  But, let's face it, words in digital space can only go so far, and if my Twitter experience had remained confined there, I think I would have eventually gotten frustrated.  But what was really uplifting about my Twitter experience was how it broadened my actual, physical theater community, too.

It started simply enough.  I was connecting with artists virtually and learning about new companies and projects all over New York City.  All of the networking and connecting and conversing was making me hungry to get out there and start seeing and supporting all the great stuff I was hearing about.  One particular person whom I was followed was the artistic director of a theater company that looked pretty cool.  The company had an intriguing show coming up, so I decided to go. 

The show was great, and after it was over, I spoke to the artistic director.  "Hi,"  I said, "I just wanted to introduce myself.  My name is Leigh Hile, I've been following you and your company on Twitter."

"Oh yeah," he said.  "Leigh.  I've been reading your blog, it's good."

I have to admit, that was a pretty sweet moment for me.  At this point, I had been living and working in New York for about four and a half years.  I had seen a lot of cool theater and introduced myself to a lot of artists I hoped to work with, many of whom I'm pretty sure forgot my name as soon as I spoke it.  This was the first time I had ever introduced myself to one such cool artist to find that he already knew my name. 

It may not seem like much, but for me, it was the beginning of a whole new way of making connections, finding a community, and becoming a part of new and exciting projects.

The artist I had been following was August Schulenburg and his theater company was Flux Theatre Ensemble.  I quickly came to find that Flux had a kind of artistic integrity that was deeply refreshing.  In addition to being incredibly talented and dedicated, the Flux community turned out to be some of the nicest, most inclusive and supportive group of theater-makers I met in New York.  Working with them brought back a sense of community and a love and excitement for creating theater that I had started to lose. 

After that, things just snowballed.  Gus first invited me to participate in Flux Sundays, and later, to direct a short scene for Flux's have another series.  There I met James Comtois, an awesome playwright and co-artistic director of Nosedive Productions, who in turn, asked me to direct a play for his theater company that summer.  Well, there must be a reason why James was hanging out with Flux, because the warmth and creative energy that I felt working with Flux just continued with my work with Nosedive.

I had more fun, and felt more of a pure purpose in my last five months in New York than I did in the five years previous; it pained me a little that I had planned to leave just when things were getting so good. 

And it didn't end there either.  I started following Kathryn Velvel Jones whom I had met through 50/50 in 2020, and watching her use social media to connect and innovate broadened my understanding of what social media and new technology can do for the arts.  Seeing her show, Better Left Unsaid, got me thinking about a whole new spectrum of theatrical possibilities.

I went to a 2amt "tweet-up" and met a huge number of artists face-to-face that until then I had only known as username, and a whole other group whom I had never heard of and, in turn, went home to follow and support.  I met new friends, new collaborators, and new theater-going buddies. 

I went to dozens of amazing shows that I never would have known about otherwise.   One such show was TerraNOVA Collective's Feeder: A Love Story by James Carter, who after meeting him in-real-life after the show, became yet another friend and collaborator; when later tweeted that I needed help figuring out how to self-produce on a larger level, James got in touch with me right away and offered his advice over coffee. 

I continued to attend Flux Sundays and other Flux readings and events, where I kept growing my circle of friends and collaborators.  I even met folks that I will be able to continue to collaborate with in New Mexico - like Charles Lucas who, as it turns out, works in New Mexico somewhat regularly.  Or like Larry Kunofsky, a great playwright who has actually written a play he's hoping to tour in New Mexico, a possibility I find incredibly exciting.

And, through James' connection to the company, I even got to see a scene from the play I directed for Nosedive in a Vampire Cowboys Saloon - a form of wish fulfillment on the geekiest level.

In seems sort of incredible.  Really?? Twitter made things so good?  But that's my story.

But You Can See The Whole Sky

Well, I did it.

I came back.  I don't think I really believed I would do it until I stepped of the plane in Albuquerque.  Maybe I still don't believe it.  I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the idea that there is no apartment, no bed waiting for me somewhere in NYC.  

So here I am in my hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico.  Gertrude Stein once said, "America is my country, but Paris is my hometown," an affirmation I wanted so badly to be true about myself and New York, I even put it in a poem.  But it turns out, it's actually the other way around: New York is and always will be my city, but Albuquerque is ostensibly, immutably, my hometown.  

It's hard.  It's really hard.  I've spent the past week and a half careening wildly between missing the city so much it blurs my vision, and being really, genuinely glad that I made this choice.  Say whatever else you will, it really is beautiful here, with those crisp fall mornings and sunny afternoons and cloudless skies that stretch from horizon to horizon.

And I swear to God, if you don't know what roasting chiles smell like, then you don't really know what fall is.  

But since I am here, and since I'm also taking a small, self-imposed break from theater (making, not seeing) to figure out the kind of work I really want to do, neither the "scenes" or the "city" part of the title of this blog really makes sense anymore.  Ultimately, that's all right - after I first started this blog, I showed it to my then-boyfriend (a casualty of my move, I'm afraid) who said, "It's a good project, but the title is kind of dumb." 

"What!?" I responded, "No it's not!  It's awesome."  And then, a mere matter of weeks later, decided it was indeed kind of dumb.  Of course, by then it was too late to change it.  

So, eventually, I'll have a new blog with a new title that has to do with... um.... whatever it is I end up doing here in New Mexico.  But in the meantime, I'm not a full-blooded Burqueña quite yet and so, as I stumble awkwardly through this transition, I'll do so PUBLICLY and hold on to this blog.  I've got loose ends to wrap up, anyway, ideas that have been rattling around in my head that I never got to express.  

Here I go.  Hasta mañana, friends.

The Benefits of Twitter, Part 1

Last night, after seeing his wonderful show in the Philly Fringe, I went out for a drink with my friend Ben along with the rest of the cast and crew.

 "What's going on?" he asked me.  "I feel like most of our conversations these days are through Twitter."

"Most of my conversations in general are through Twitter," I joked. 

He laughed.  "I think that might say something about you you don't want to be said." 

"Twitter completely opened up my theater world," I said to him without hesitation, embarrassment, or hyperbole.  My friend Sarah, who was sitting with us, thought about it for a second.  "It's true," she said.  "It kind of did."

Ben is not the only person to have given me a hard time about using Twitter.  It seems like the (first) world is divided pretty squarely into people who are really into Twitter and people who are really not into Twitter.  "Ugh," my sisters scoffed when I went home for Christmas last December after I signed on to check my feed.  "I CANNOT BELIEVE you are on TWITTER." 

"It's for networking purposes ONLY!" I defended.

Although I've gotten increasingly more social in tone over the past year, my Twitter account was and remains specifically a tool to broaden and deepen my community as a theater artist.  It's worked surprisingly, spectacularly well.  Go ahead, challenge me on it.  I will sing my love of Twitter to the rafters every. damn. time.

It's a bit reductive to say, "it's not what you know, it's who you know" about making theater in New York, but you learn pretty quickly that it's damn near impossible to do without a strong and supportive network of people whom you can draw on for resources. Finding actors, designers and technicians, getting connected to rehearsal and performance space, borrowing props and costumes,  securing financial support, simply seeking experience and advice, finding a person or company to produce your project, or evening finding the project ITSELF - none of this can get done without a group of people who like you or your work and are invested in your success.

Five years ago, as a cripplingly shy girl who found it difficult just to tell a stranger I enjoyed their show without my heart sort of leaping into my throat, building such a community was difficult.  I sucked it up, bit the bullet, pressed on and eventually got a lot more adept at socializing with strangers, but networking has never been my strong suit.  I've always been looking for new ways to make connections, get involved, and my foray into the theatrical interwebs started as just that - another idea. 

"I've been thinking about starting a blog," I said to a friend off-handedly.  "I think it might, you know, widen my community.  I'm thinking it would be a good way to talk to people I wouldn't normally meet.  And I write a lot better than I speak.  I'm way more articulate."  Plus, I had been moderately aware of the community since the marketing director at Women's Project had asked during me my internship to compile a list of New York theater bloggers for a "grassroots campaign."  I knew for a fact that there were a lot of interesting playwrights and producers writing worth reading and talking to.  As soon as the words left my mouth, I realized it was a really, really good idea.

So I did it.  Right away, I started feeling the benefits.  I found I really loved learning about arts, culture, politics and current events through the lenses of people who worked and thought and created like me.  I found dozens of exciting and engaging blogs like Parabasis, CultureFuture, On Theater and Politics, Jamespeak, and of course, 2AM Theatre.  I also found that it kept me thoughtful and engaged and gave me a sense of creative purpose to write on a regular basis.

Except nobody was really reading my blog, except my dad, who to this day I believe remains its biggest fan.  I emailed a friend of mine who had a very successful blog and asked her how to get people to read it.  She emailed me a pretty awesome list of things to do (which, with her permission, maybe I'll post if anybody's interested?) the most salient of which seemed to be Join Twitter.

I resisted.  I did not DO Twitter, I did not UNDERSTAND Twitter, I did not LIKE Twitter.  But saw her reasoning and opened an account.  It took me a long, long time to figure it out.  I remember messaging a friend of mine who was already an avid Twitter-user in extreme frustration, "Can you PLEASE explain to me how a hashtag works???"

I remember I agonized about my first tweet.  What the hell was I supposed to say?  What did I have to say that was important enough or interesting enough to "tweet" it? 

I later realized that the answer to that question is nothing, which is at once the beauty and the terror of the 140-character limit.  Every once in a while, something really profound or worthwhile can emerge, but generally speaking, there is very little one can say in 140 characters that is of any substance whatsoever, or that makes any sense on its own, as an isolated piece of information.  The result, on the negative side, is that Twitter becomes a dumping ground for all manner of inanity that would best remain unsaid.

The cool part of it, though, is that it creates this culture, this environment of not having to think too hard about what you have to say, and all of these random ideas, responses, jokes, and revelations all get released into this big communal cloud of stream-of-consciousness. The worth lies not in the singular but in the collective.  It's not about any one specific person, or one specific tweet, it's about easy, dynamic exchange of thoughts as they appear and are shared publicly.  It becomes about the conversation.

I became immediately obsessed and in love with that conversation.  I followed my favorite blog, 2amt, to the concurrent dialogue on Twitter, even though I had absolutely no clue what a hashtag conversation meant.  The idea of an engaging and supportive community conducted digitally across time and space has never been so fully realized as it has been by 2amt.  I was welcomed with open virtual arms for the simple and undiscriminating reason that I was smart enough to learn to type the characters #2amt before I pressed the button that said "Tweet." 

Through 2amt I met more and more people, and my virtual community began to both expand and deepen.  The experience made me realize that there was a whole facet of this whole "networking" thing that I hadn't understood and had been sorely missing these five years that I've spent in New York: a network that is not just a source of knowledge and support, but a source inspiration.  A group of people whose ideas excite you, and whose questions challenge you.  A group that gets you constantly thinking about the work that you really want to do, because you're constantly seeing and hearing about the kind of work that you really want to do.  It's not enough, I realized, to have a support base of people who want you to do your work, you need to have a support base who make you want to do your work.  These people, these challenging, engaging, inspiring people, I found on Twitter, of all places.

Harlem Grey Gardens

Our downstairs neighbors are gone. Evicted -- I saw the notice go up on their door at the beginning of August, and now, at the beginning of September, they have long disappeared.

I've been meaning to write about their departure since I saw the eviction notice go up, but every time I try to piece together the significance of their going, how sad and strange it is that they should go now of all times, I come up a bit short.

To understand how much their presence marked the time Sarah and I spent in this little apartment, I have to go all the way back to the beginning, to when we first moved in. We become aware of the two women, a mother and a daughter, who lived directly below us almost immediately; they didn't make themselves easy to miss. They babbled and muttered to themselves on the stairs. They averted eye contact when we saw them, or sometimes simply had that bleary look of someone whose vision is not in this plane of space and time. They dressed in dirty, disheveled clothing, the mother's immense dinnerplate glasses permanently skewed across her face. They cursed at us under their breath as we passed them.

In our first few months in the place, we were plagued by a number of pestilences. Mice, bugs, and, most troubling to me, a weird, unpleasant smell that drifted through the pipes. The super blamed them all on the women downstairs. "Their apartment is filthy," he told me. "And they won't let nobody in to clean it." More gossip floated in over the next few months: They lived in complete squalor; the apartment hadn't been cleaned or renovated in years; they had four big dogs that they didn't walk enough and the apartment was covered in newspaper and shit. When people knocked on the door, they never answered.

It's hard to separate the truth from the myth, but I will say that once their door was left open long enough to get a peek inside.  I didn't look squalorous, it looked abandoned.  Wrecked.  It looked like the gutted out remains of a crumbling building before it's completely rebuilt.

Sometimes Sarah and I speculated on the two ladies who were the apparent source of all our apartment problems. Sometimes we swapped unbelievable stories. Once, I ran into one of them rounding a corner and she took a swing in surprise. Once, Sarah let her pass on stairs, ushering her through with a friendly, "go ahead," to which the woman responded, "Don't f*cking tell me what to do, f*ck you."

They were frustrating and tiresome, but mostly just a joke or a crazy anecdote. We called them "Harlem Grey Gardens," a name that fit even more aptly when a neighbor told me the daughter once sang at the Apollo and had been booed offstage. Then in the fall of that year, Sarah again ran into the same woman, the daughter, on the stairs, only this time she not only swung, but made contact, hitting Sarah a couple of times in the head before Sarah could get away. Then they became scary.

We called the company that at the time managed the building, and thus began a several-year-long oddessey of us asking them what they intended to do about the violently disturbed neighbors downstairs and them doing the management company equivalent of shrugging and sighing and avoiding our questions. They told us to file a police report, which we did - now what? They told us to file a police report if we had another altercation with them, which we did - now what? They eventually handed us off to a lawyer who would periodically email us about upcoming hearings that went nowhere and accomplished nothing, guardians supposedly assigned by the state who changed nothing, and would occasionally ask us to be available to "testify" in some hearing or another, but would never follow through.

I went through a very fearful period, as I know Sarah did as well. The daughter, whose name was Denise (we learned a lot about the women in this time - the daughter was Denise, the mother was June and while both seemed deeply unstable, only the daughter appeared to be violent) never hit either or us again, but she did try to attack Sarah once or twice more but both times Sarah screamed at her so loudly she retreated. And she chased me down the stairs a number of times, issuing curses and threats the entire time. It was during this time that I held my breath every time I walked past her door, avoided unnecessary trips up and down the stairs, was afraid to do laundry because of the noise I made dragging my laundry bag.

Eventually, things died down. The daughter stopped accosting Sarah in the hall. Although she would occasionally open the door and hiss as I walked by, she stopped chasing me down the stairs. Sarah speculated that she had been "off her meds" when she had attacked her - it would explain the relative peace after that brief, violent period.

We stopped contacting the lawyer. We both got tired. And I, for my part, decided that I didn't want to have a hand in their eviction. I saw a legal document once that stated their rent, which was $125 per month, all of which paid, no doubt, with some kind of government aid as they clearly had neither jobs nor anybody taking care of them. If they lost this apartment, I doubted their ability to find a new place to live. This is how homeless people are made, I thought to myself.

Things eventually assumed a state of normalcy, although their presence was never really forgotten. The ownership of the apartment building changed hands, but the new management company seemed as impotent as the last on this issue. The women would still occasionally issue threats as I passed their door, I'd ignore them. Sometimes they'd bang on their ceiling - our floor - when they felt we were being too noisy, but sometimes they'd bang on their ceiling when I was sitting quietly on the couch so I ignored that too. I never really stopped holding my breath as I passed their door, never stopped feeling my heart beat in my throat when I heard steps approaching me on the stairs, thinking, is it her? Never stopped idly wondering if someday she'd snap and lunge at me from her door with a kitchen knife or a frying pan.

It's kind of hard to wrap my head around the fact that I know the answer now. No. No, no she'll never snap and come at me with a frying pan because she's gone. I still hold my breath walking past her door and then remind myself I don't have to. And I even start a little when I hear someone on the stairs of a different building.

And it's bizarre, almost confusing, that these women - these women who have so defined my time in this apartment and thus my time in New York City are leaving now, now of all times. When Sarah and I are both vacating the apartment, and my time in New York is coming to a permanent close. It makes things feel frighteningly final, like it's not just me leaving, a whole world is shutting off.

The good news is, I hear they're moving somewhere in the Bronx, not to the street. Sarah ran into our new landlord in the hall, and he told her the story. But it's still a little sad, I think. Sarah also learned from the landlord that both the mother and the daughter are in fact diagnosed with schizophrenia, so I hope this means someone actually is looking out for them, that they'll be taken care of the way the need to be. I hope they do okay in the Bronx, or wherever they land.

Sobbing My Guts Out (Or: Observations in Storytelling and Catharsis)

Here's a thing that happened to me during the Lab, that I meant to write about but didn't, because, you know, my life had been swallowed.

On the evening second day off, after nearly 13 days straight of Lab insanity, I made a curious and altogether uncharacteristic choice: I watched Boys Don't Cry. It's a movie I'd been meaning to watch for ages - essentially since the movie came out - because I felt it was an important movie. But it didn't seem like a fun movie; it certainly wasn't a movie I wanted to watch.

Boys Don't Cry is a pretty extreme film by anyone's standards, but for me? Let's just say I have exceedingly low-brow taste when it comes to movies. I don't like sad movies, or intellectual movies, or movies that are too deep or two slow. Oh, and I don't really like any of that mushy romantic stuff either. I used to, and I still make the occasional except for a supreme piece of cornball [crap], like the remake of Sabrina or Love Actually, but basically when it comes to movies, I like to watch people make jokes and blow stuff up.

So why, why on earth would I, in the middle of this blisteringly intense creative experience, want to drain myself even further by watching, OF ALL MOVIES, Boys Don't Cry?

Well, I can't quite explain it, but even so, I think from an artistic perspective it's worth noticing, and remembering:

During that time, I was so tightly wound up, so tense, so stressed from the Lab experience, that I needed a release. I needed, basically, to sob my guts out, and either couldn't or wasn't ready to do it in response to my own inner life.

That's fine; that need for catharsis is understandable and, as an artist, familiar territory. But what interests me is that, while I almost never go for a movie like Boys Don't Cry, I do crave release when I watch my low-brow stuff-blowing-up usual fare. But it's a different kind of release, in response to a different kind of emotional life: I want to get swept away in the adventure and the excitement of an experience that bears no resemblance whatsoever to my everyday life. In July, in the Lab, for some reason I craved the opposite - it's like I needed a sort of adrenaline drain.

So why is it that in one particular situation I craved a certain kind of catharsis, and in another I feel I need a different kind? I don't ask because I'm interested in parsing out the tangled layers of my psyche. I ask because, as a storyteller, I think it's interesting to take note of the different kinds of catharsis that a story can offer. And I wonder: If I can maybe understand better the kind of emotional release that is sparked by a Boys Don't Cry story, as opposed to a, say, a Die Hard story, if I could know more intimately why and when and how people crave release, maybe I could serve them better; maybe I could be a better artist.