MFA Year 1: Crave
(apologies for video qality)
My project in Spring 2026 was the biggest leap outside my comfort zone, and ultimately my biggest failure. However, I learned certain invaluable lessons from this process. After almost two years at Arhaus, I started to understand what my professors meant by ‘‘embodied writing.’’ I experienced embodied writing as a genuine translation from a physical sensation or emotion into a creative idea. It was a more visceral, direct version of my Active Imagination work.. I had recently made a piece in our Clown class that started purely from a feeling. A feeling of repressed, unfulfilled desire. This blossomed into an absurd oedipal Mother/Son duet. Without conscious thought, the complexities of what I felt played out between the characters.
Going into our April presentations, I wondered if there were ways I could take a similar approach when directing. Inspired by this clown piece, my aim was to theatrically, symbolically portray the experience of repressed desire and its aftermath. Remembering the creative missteps in my 2025 directorial experiment, I pushed myself to not use a text. I also wanted to start with a less developed concept and allow more to unfold in the rehearsal. Predictably, doing this in a group was very complicated. I felt adrift without the anchor of a writer’s words, and my process showed this. I knew I still needed a structure to contain it, particularly while working with emotions, particularly while leading a group, but I was uncertain what was needed.
My uncertainty led me to use Anne Bogart’s Viewpoints book. The chapter on ‘‘Viewpoints toward original work’’ helped me find a starting point without a text. I used this chapter as a sort-of process map. I started with her big 3 building blocks:
Question: What
Anchor: Our own generated unconscious material
Structure: Euripide’s the Bacchae (I felt this play/myth really embodied my question)
I loosely planned what I wanted to accomplish each phase of the rehearsal process, and told the performers as much as I could about my idea before they decided to join. I asked them if they had suggestions for structure as far as emotional boundaries. We agreed on three things: we never had to share anything we didn’t want, we should find ways to get to the concept indirectly, and they could always step out or change something when needed.
My methodology was muddy, but worked as an ongoing experiment. To generate initial material, I would bring ideas for exercises to rehearsals, try them out, and based on what worked and didn’t, come back with new ones.
Some things we tried:
Teach them the basics of Viewpoints composition. Have them bring in an image, song or short text about repressed desire, something they personally related to. Use that as the point of inspiration for the viewpoints composition.
Similar to my last piece-create a ritual about repressed desire. You have 10 minutes.
I bring in everything I know and don’t know about the piece. We brainstorm based on what I don’t know.
The largest breakdown of communication between everyone came when we started taking what worked from the exercises to form the larger piece. I had come to rehearsal with an idea for a structure, but it was too unspecific. The performers were expecting me to give them directions, but I felt as lost as they were. In this specific rehearsal, one performer yelled at me ‘I need you to give me something I can ACT!’ and I agreed, but I didn’t know how. Another performer told me the process was becoming emotionally difficult for her. She was fine being a performer for me, but the writing process brought up too many difficult emotions.
In my efforts to work more intuitively, be less literal and prescriptive, I swung too far in the other direction and created an opaque and emotionally-charged environment. I was unclear about if the performers were just performers or also writers, I was unclear in what way I was leading them, and I was unable to communicate effectively because my ideas were still living in some wordless place inside me.
This piece gave me two very important take-aways I brought into my next project:
This murky, instinctual, physical, place I found with embodied writing is very helpful in creation, but does not work for effective leadership.To a certain degree these need to be two distinct modes: me facilitating a space and me creating from a place of emotion and intuition.
When working with emotion, there needs to be some type of concrete mask─be it a story, a character, an object, something to channel through that doesn’t leave us all completely exposed to one another.
Although emotionally fraught, I do think this process generated some interesting material. In a few days break I had from rehearsal, I was able to find something that seemed to synthesize much of what we generated. This absorbing and synthesizing is something I brought into my next process.