I’m in Pendleton at Robert’s brother’s house this morning. Geese are squawking out the window, over a frozen lake.

Yesterday’s postmortem of the Convergence was difficult. I had to come to terms with the truth that I have, in many ways, let Rob and Caitlin down by not being completely clear with them about what I could take on for this conference. I promised to do a lot of things, and many of them didn’t happen.

In the light of this we have restructured our organization a bit, so that they are co-artistic directors, and I’m an associate artistic director with a focus on development & grantwriting. This reflects that they are local and I’m never going to live here, and also that they have about ten times more time to spend on the project than I do.

This is a good agreement, but I just wish that I had known how to make this clear to all of us before I started.

There were also some hard truths to learn about the way I handled the Umbrella Project, 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE CHORUS. I didn’t have the music ready soon enough, or the script. I created a script that was far too ambitious for the people and the time we had. I pitched the project to them as an exploration, not a presentation of a finished script – but it kept getting more grandiose – and soon we were in a situation where I was trying to force dancers to sing and act. Not a good place to be. They stepped up to it, but it was really tough for all of us.

As a result of THIS, we have restructured the concept of the Umbrella Project, so that it’ll never again be about someone trying to workshop a finished script. Instead, it’ll be about having open rehearsal time to explore a theme or concept, and taking all of the artists involved under that Umbrella – performing in the art form in which they are most comfortable.

This is also a good way to move forward, but I wish I had had the self-knowledge to foresee this, too.

“I wish I knew now
what I didn’t know then…”

It is a humbling experience to realize that your
1) lack of communication
2) over-ambitious expectations
combined to create an untenable situation for people you love and respect.

I want to learn how to work so these situations don’t arise. Or learn how to deal with them better when they do. I feel like my year of assistant directing has taught me a lot about how to work with actors, how to run a rehearsal, but not so much about how to not expect the impossible from creative teams.

Robert and Caitlin are both very clear that they want me to stay working with them, and that it’s just about restructuring all of our expectations. I’m grateful for that. After all, we all made mistakes this year, and the first year of starting a new arts conference is bound to be earth-shatteringly difficult.

But I made it more difficult than it had to be, and then none of us did a good job of talking about that.

I’m, of course, glad I had the opportunity to work on this script in the first place. But I should have been workshopping it as a written piece, rather than trying to write a new play with music and stage it with a cast of people who don’t sing. The fact that we pulled it off doesn’t make it right.

I had a lot of warnings that this was happening. I spent most of the month of January in Denver feeling like “This is all going terribly wrong.” Maybe none of us knew exactly how to fix it, having committed to something untenable, no one wants to be the first to back out. But I wish, so much, that I had had the courage to be that one.

At any rate, we’ll do better next year, I guess. It’s a weird feeling to know that your incompetence led to a better organization being created. Incompetence isn’t the right word. Maybe it’s stubbornness.