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SITI Company is approaching its twentieth year.  Yes, twenty years!  One of the biggest challenges that we face is our capacity to reinvent ourselves rather than capitulate to the human tendency to repeat old worn down, unexamined patterns.  If SITI is to thrive in the coming years, we must re-assess the stories that we tell others and ourselves about ourselves, and we must invent new narratives when necessary. 

We are looking seriously at how decisions are made, how projects are initiated, funded, diversified and carried out and how we might possibly move forward effectively into the next decade.  One big development in thought and action is our determination to create a shared leadership model for SITI.  The Company endorses the idea whole-heartedly. Shared leadership seems to be the inevitable next step.  And so we agreed: I will share the artistic leadership of SITI with Company members Ellen Lauren and Leon Ingulsrud. 

The initial steps towards shared leadership are awkward.  How do we explain this new model to the world?  How do we organize the day-to-day implementation of the plan?  What do we call ourselves? One day Ellen walked into the SITI office, looked around and began to re-arrange the furniture.  Literally.  She forged space for two new workstations – one for her and one for Leon.  And then both of them got down to work.  Suddenly the nuts and bolts of shared leadership became clearer and more fluid.  Architecture helps.  So does action.  The more we act in concord with the narrative that we are trying to tell, the more the story, what is initially a fiction, becomes a reality.   Speak the narrative that you want to realize and then find the appropriate actions to make that story a reality. 

I am interested in narratives that can be used consciously to make things happen.  In consciously and slowly “wrighting” the story that we are trying to tell, perhaps intentional, substantive change is possible.  Daniel Kahneman in his beautiful new book Thinking Fast and Slow, distinguishes between fast, impulsive thinking and slow deliberate thinking. Slow thinking requires far more effort and attention.  Slow thinking alters the body’s blood flow, increases muscular tension and even dilates the eyes.  Slow thinking also tends to make things happen.

One of the more problematic issues in the contemporary American theater is that stories that we tell others and ourselves about ourselves are generally weak.  We have developed an inferiority complex.  The narratives that we have constructed about who we are have made us feel and act like beggars and lesser citizens. We are conditioned by habit and faulty narratives not to expect much in terms of support and endorsement and therefore we receive very little.  It is a self-fulfilling prophecy because expectations do create experience.  But with serious, conscious slow thinking, we can change our expectations and change our story.

As a theater director and a child of postmodernism, during most of my career I avoided the charge of storytelling.  I was more interested in subverting stories, turning them on their head, reversing them, twisting and turning them inside out rather than serving them up in a conventional way.  The destructive impulse led my approach to stories.  To me, stories could be renewed only through their deconstruction.

And yet, something new is brewing in my approach to making new work.  The storytelling that comes naturally to me in daily life is entering into my thinking about theater.  I know that telling stories in life is a powerful tool to communicate ideas and lessons drawn from experience, but until now I have avoided fully embracing the subject in my work as a director.  As we enter a new era ushered in by the bristling impact of new technologies and modes of communication, deconstruction has ceased to be as useful as it once was. My thinking about the means and methods of theater making is changing and I am asking new questions: Whose stories need attention?  Who needs to hear these stories and in what context should they be performed?  While it is true that art does not directly change the world, it does change the way that we see the world.  Art can change perception.

I have always enjoyed telling stories, turning lived experience into anecdote, narrative, or what Tadashi Suzuki labels, “the thrill the fiction.”   In telling stories I often exaggerate or add details that make the narrative more dramatic.  Usually I end up believing my own embellishments. Stories are ways in which I make sense of the existential blips and bleeps of my daily existence. The stories that I tell are the way that I communicate ideas, ethics and morals.  From direct experience a narrative is forged that moves like a communicable virus and carries the lessons of the experience to share with others. 

I know that the narratives that I choose in life determine the sort of life that I live.  I create who I am with the stories I tell.  I write myself into existence by the stories that I tell about my life.  I also write with my posture and with my manner of walking and of speaking and I write with my words and actions in the world.  I can write fuzzily or, with extra expressive effort and slow thought, I can write clearly.  I impress myself upon and INTO others around me.  I become part of them and they become part of me.  I write and I am written upon.  My DNA writes upon me and my family writes upon me.  I am written upon by the experiences that I undergo, by the people that I meet, the books that I read and the music that I listen to.  Writing and being written upon is cyclical.  Most of my days are lived within the confines of the evolving narratives that I spin about who I am now and how I experience moments in time.  I alternate between being caught up in the moment and filtering my experience through memory.

We are all inheritors of the great stories, myths and parables that formed who we are and how we think about the world including our morality and ethics.  The stories that I tell are often adaptations of these valuable fictions.  But there are also new stories that are being generated constantly and we are the transmitters of these stories.  We create meaning via the stories that we invent about our own experiences and the actions that we take because of them. The stories merge lived experience with memories of other, older, inherited stories.  We humans are the adaptors of models.  We tinker with stories.