Thought Residencies

My name is Alan Dilworth, and this is thought number eight. I am thinking about minds and hearts. In particular during this time of crisis when there is so much uncertainty and anxiety. I wonder how peoples' minds and hearts are doing. I sit on a cushion everyday, in the morning, and am still and quiet. But inside are storms. Calms. Outside the sun is shining. I cut an apple. Children are social d...

My name is Alan Dilworth, and this is thought number seven. With the opening of some isolation restrictions around the world it is hard not to default to the hope of a return to the way things were. Hmmm. How have things changed? For one, our house is beginning to enter a new chapter. I can't help but think that somehow we have incorporated some more eclectic approaches to how we arrange objects a...

My name is Alan Dilworth, and this is thought number six.  This morning I am thinking about the joy of two way radios, or walkie talkies. My daughter asked for a pair so she can chat with one of her best friends who lives in a townhouse across from us. They have a date at 11am this morning to walkie talkie talk. This morning her friend shared her handle- Matilda. My daughter's handle is Madonna. A...

My name is Alan Dilworth, this is thought number five. I am always curious about how ideas and experiences are shaped by the containers we use to contain them. Some containers are conceptual, some spatial, intellectual, metaphorical, spiritual, financial, and in our moment most certainly digital. So many of us are experiencing Zoom as a container for our professional and personal communication. Zo...

My name is Alan Dilworth, this is thought number five. I am always curious about how ideas and experiences are shaped by the containers we use to contain them. Some containers are conceptual, some spatial, intellectual, metaphorical, spiritual, financial, and in our moment most certainly digital. So many of us are experiencing Zoom as a container for our professional and personal communication. Zo...

My name is Alan Dilworth, this is thought number four. This curtain is the curtain that I sit in front of every morning. This morning it struck me how much an object, like this curtain, can sum up part of this experience of staying at home. We are spending so much time confined in our spaces. We are encountering the same objects over and over again. This morning sitting in front of the curtain, I...

My name is Alan Dilworth, this is thought number three. This is my daughter two days ago riding one of two bikes that she was regifted. This bike was given to her almost three years ago. It's too small for her, but she is riding it anyways because she is motivated to master this bike thing, and anyways the other bike was not yet in Toronto. This image is her rocking it during homeschool recess. Sh...

My name is Alan Dilworth, this is thought number two.  I am thinking about the rhythm and experience of change today, about being raw, the knife's edge, glowing coals stepping out from behind what is the known into the... unknown. I am thinking about uncertainty, about texts and words and ideas and experiences that rob one of the ground under one's feet. I am thinking about Erin Shields and Jose S...

My name is Alan Dilworth, and this is thought number one. I'm in the process of translating something I created called The Stillness Room to a live digital platform. The Stillness Room is the coming together in a room, most often with a group of theater-makers, to experience silence and stillness but with a simple but clear container. The Stillness Room has been about making time and space, litera...

I'm Jessica Watkin and this is my fourteenth and final thought. Here's The Compassion Project Part 2. I've had a hard time making art without a deadline, without someone to make it for , without a gallery exhibit coming up, without an opening night looming, without a holiday to exchange gifts. But today I started my first piece of art that is only for me. New rug, new project. I want to stand on t...

I'm Jessica Watkin and this is my thirteenth thought, and this is part one of The Compassion Project. I am too hard on myself. I am everyone else's hype person, and I struggle to be there for me. I work so hard on so many projects and still feel I'm never doing enough. I crash and burn often, my eye crashes every Thursday from overuse and fatigue. I'm exhausted. So I decided to start saying it out...

I'm Jessica Watkin and this is my twelfth thought. And I'm gonna be honest for a second about online performances and how I don't think its interesting or engaging or useful for performance creators and performers right now to be trying to recreate the experience of in-person theatre online. I think that, yes, we are given a computer screen which is a square and very proscenium but there's no way...

I'm Jessica Watkin and this is my eleventh thought and I'm going to tell a story today about fear.   The last time I was in London, England, I was at a show at the National Theatre and when it finished it was so dark outside, like super dark, like too dark for a Blind person to be out alone in, and I got completely turned around. I had my cane but there was no one around me, and I found myself ran...

I'm Jessica Watkin and this is my tenth thought, and I am telling you the story today of being a blind person and going for a walk during the pandemic! So I'm out with my cane because I cannot see if I'm six feet away from people. (sound of cane and wind) (Jessica sniffles) And so the cane helps folks stay away from me! (sound of cane, a car, and Jessica breathing)

I'm Jessica Watkin and this is my ninth thought and this week I'm going to tell some stories. At the Republic of Inclusion in 2017, we ended the summit with a cocreation of space. We were prompted to do anything to make us feel comfortable and have ease in engaging with the music provided. Everyone around me found chairs, mats, blankets, sunglasses, stickers, fidget toys, temperature and light cha...

I'm Jessica Watkin and this is my eighth thought. I'm craving nature. I'm craving putting my bare feet in the sand and dirt, water, grass. I'm really craving tulips because it's springtime. But I can't find any that are cheap enough and support a local business. So instead, I've done actually the first creative thing in a while and I've cut out small shapes of tulip bulbs, tulip heads that have sp...

I'm Jessica Watkin and this is my seventh thought. This pandemic has brought me two insights about myself: The first is a newfound grounding in my role as a "good" facilitator. It turns out I'm trusted in the community to hold space for artists, prod, poke, and ask questions, and use the answers creatively to find solutions. This is also how I define dramaturgy, so that's good. The second thing is...

I'm Jessica Watkin and this is my sixth thought. I'm outside and it's damp and it's warm. Could that be how the whole world feels right now? I've been thinking about intuition, ritual, routine. How do we as a species find our own individual rhythms to carry out our lives? How much do we cling to these mundane rituals when the earth shakes beneath our feet? A dear colleague of mine uses terms from...

I'm Jessica Watkin and this is my fifth thought.  And I'm having a hard time arranging my thoughts today. So I am going to talk towards a definition of what Disability Dramaturgy is... because that's my thing. While I work with a fellow Disabled artist we focus on safety, energy, support. We normalize cancelled plans, build flexibility into our schedules, and meet virtually. We talk out our aggres...

I'm Jessica Watkin and this is my fourth thought. It occurred to me today while practicing yoga that I am so comforted during activities that take care of watching the time for me. Where it isn't my responsibility to watch the minutes tick by but I am supposed to just... be present. This is yoga classes. This is theatre performances. This is therapy and online meetings I am not chairing. If someon...

I'm Jessica Watkin and this is my third thought. I made a rug last year for the first time, I hooked it, and I made it nonvisual and tactile. And I've been thinking about the future of tactile art: pieces that encourage and invite touch, post-pandemic. Will we consider each other differently? The proximity? The closeness? Or will we be finding a new way to touch, to connect in a newly normal way?...

I'm Jessica Watkin and this is my second thought. I've been thinking a lot about care, and how to actually take care of one another. I think this situation with Coronavirus has made me think even more, if that is possible, about how we have built the structures around us to take care of each other. And I'm stuck on this idea of carefull- not careful as in, "ooh I've got to be careful I don't wake...

I'm Jessica Watkin and this is my first thought. This is a weird and hard time for artists, and everyone, but I am hearing about hope popping up around me. The sky can still be blue after it opens with rain. People have started to listen and find ways to creatively support one another from isolation. As a Disabled artist and scholar I have had to creatively find support… theatre and academia are i...

It's Eva. This is thought number [thirteen]. I read this thing on facebook today that got me a bit frustrated. It was a post saying how versatile artists are, and how they're used to having multiple jobs and hustling to make ends meet, especially in challenging times. And the thought behind this was very well-intentioned and I believe it's true as well, but what frustrates me is the romanticizatio...

It's Eva. This is thought twelve. Today I was reading a play that I've been writing for the last year or so and I found it hard to hook into because I'm so consumed with the immediate moment. And I had to clock for myself that inside of this crisis my humanity is still existent. I'm still grappling with the same problems on top of this. So for me my desire is to not let this crisis consume me, and...