 Downtown Ulaanbaatar with Matt's cousin Jessica
 Riding horses at Yoliin Am Gorge
 Bayanzag, the discovery site of petrified dinosaur eggs
 Admiring baby Bactrians in the Gobi desert
 Post sand dune exhaustion  Sunset at Khongor Sand Dune
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My stop in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia was the final stop of my fellowship and one of the busiest. A year ago, I met Uyanga Ayurzana at a conference. When I learned that she was the founder and artistic director of Bamboo Theatre- a theatre for young audiences in Mongolia- I immediately approached her (I secured TWO of my five stops by cold-approaching people that I didn't know so let this be a lesson to other anxious people that this unfortunately works). In a testament to her open-mindedness, Uyanga agreed to host me in UB. On zoom, we decided that I would create a new play for audiences under the age of six. Bamboo Theatre has a "baby play" for every season: winter, summer, and spring. All that was missing was fall. When I arrived at Bamboo, I quickly realized that the team was talented and well-experienced in developing new plays. They performed several shows a day on top of administrative duties and side projects like participating in The Voice Mongolia or starring in a television show. I felt honored and intimidated to direct such established artists. We rehearsed four days a week for several hours a day, racing to explore our theme and structure a new play in six weeks. Luckily, my collaborators were full of amazing ideas. We started working with a broader company, then narrowed down to my three ride-or-dies: Odko, Zoloo, and Tuju. By early May, we landed on a surprising premise- Fall(oon)- a play about fall made of balloons. Uyanga hired a composer, Nurlan, and a designer, Zombaa. We premiered Fall(oon) just a day before I had to leave Mongolia. At my farewell dinner, I felt so proud of everyone and so lucky to have been given the chance to create something new. Not only had the whole team put in hours and hours of work into our project, they had picked me up from my airbnb every day, helped me book a tour of the Gobi desert, and taken me out for drinks and countless midday iced coffees. We had overcome a tight timeline and language barriers to make something truly special (poor Zoloo's brain was about to explode from the effort of translating back and forth between me and Odko). Now, Fall(oon) will be a permanent part of Bamboo's repertory, and we are already scheming about when we can see each other next, hopefully at a festival, or for a new project in the US! Meeting theatre artists from around the world has been one of the most rewarding parts of this fellowship- and leaving them behind has been one of the hardest.  Members of the Fall(oon) team. L-R: Odko, baby Barkhas, Uyanga, me, Zoloo, Kha, and Tuju
 In a seven-seat taxi on the way to rehearsal. Back L-R: Astou, Abdoulaye, and Zeynabou. Middle L-R: Nicolas, me, Sandrine, and Sandrine's daughter, Jade. Alain and our driver Abdoulaye were up front!
 My class and our instructor, Carlo Jacucci, on the final day of a 10-day clown intensive at École Philippe Gaulier
The next day, I couldn’t hide any longer. I put on a mask and before I had even made my official entrance, I had made the audience laugh. The thrill of success hit me like a lighting bolt. I was hooked. I got a second laugh. Then it was time to enter for real. Once onstage, it was a flop, a catastrophe. I was drummed off. I sat down somehow feeling that it had gone well. For the remaining nine days, I experienced frustratingly nonlinear growth. Sometimes, especially when I was caught up in a game or the thrill of the moment, I was funny. Often, I was not. I was in my head. I was no good at voices. Flop, flop, flop. I watched my classmates fail repeatedly. Carlo mixed in suggestions with his insults. Look at the audience. Be an optimist- believe that this is the funniest thing anyone has ever done! Don’t play a character. Be specific. Do something special. Have many stupid ideas. Some of my classmates went from performing in dead silence to provoking uproarious laughter. One or two came in funny and left funnier. Most of us were funny sometimes. I left hungry for more. I felt a sense of community in this weird world where we wore red noses and learned how to do handstands on each other’s knees and they sold us soup for three euros for lunch. It reminded me of the first time I went to Lac du Bois as a teenager- both the weirdness and the intense sense of belonging. As for teaching with insults, the intensive reminded me not to make absolute statements (“insulting your students is poor teaching”) because some odd situation will come along and introduce a perplexing counterexample. In many ways, Carlo was modeling Gaulier’s concept of complicity. The twinkle in his eyes let us know that he was on our side. The insults were to make us laugh, to make us better. We were playing a game. It’s not so different from CLV and our grand simulation, after all. “This is France” "Your name is Clementine now" wink wink, nudge nudge. I won't return to Lac du Bois and tell new monos that their lesson plans are a catastrophe or tell villagers that listening to them speak French is the worst moment of my day, but I’m maybe a little more comfortable with failure and a lot more excited about clowning. Overall… it was a flop, but in a good way.  It's unclear why I am smiling in this picture, as I was failing miserably at the time it was taken
I can't get over how lucky I am to have these experiences. Even when I am am gnashing my teeth over my defense powerpoint (how do I condense 70 pages into 15 slides?!), I'm grateful for every second.
My neighborhood in Montréal and Parc la Fontaine  
The Road to Québec City and Québec City
Parc National du Bic and the Premiere of Joséphine et les grandes personnes 
 -Excerpt from Une petite fête- Cabaret de la dissidence (The Little Cabaret- A Celebration of Dissidence) at Le Carrousel Hello everyone from Montréal. I’m sharing a snippet of the play currently being staged at my internship. I’ve been observing rehearsals of Une petite fête. I’ve also been writing my master’s thesis on theatre and social change- 13,000 words and counting. As usual, the world is both beautiful- red maple leaves! a trip to Toronto! - and sad. Though I didn’t know François Fouquerel as well as many at CLV, my thoughts are with his family and the many community members who will miss his mentorship and humor. It’s strange to think he won’t be in Lac du Bois’s kitchen next summer, sharing meals that remind him of his own French childhood, and taking his staff on picnics. I’m thinking also of other sadness in the world- brutal hurricanes caused by climate change, deadly wars, a genocide funded by our own government. I feel powerless, so privileged, sometimes hopeless. adrienne maree brown, a scholar of social change, writes, “The whole is a mirror of the parts. Existence is fractal- the health of the cell is the health of the species.” If the whole is a mirror of the parts, tiny changes radiate out into the wider world. Someone like François, who built community throughout his life, makes a small, important change. I’m trying to nurture hope in the small things, like supporting a play that encourages children to speak out and question authority, to dissent. I'm grateful for many opportunities and joys. Petit à petit, Miel
Featuring Radioactive Soup, Fairies, and a Cat Show Fairy drawn by Zé For anyone hoping to stretch their theatrical muscles during the pandemic, I suggest the following exercise: - Improvise a skit - With actors who aren’t in the same room as you - In French - On a Zoom call with 50 kids - Most of whom don’t speak French These are unusually specific limitations. But, as Chil Kong (Artistic Director of Adventure Theater) said at the DC Theatre Summit in January, narrow parameters produce innovative work. I saw this firsthand as a virtual French counselor at Lac du Bois this summer. Lac du Bois, an immersion program in northern Minnesota, uses performance as a language teaching tool. Theater is present in the skits that introduce the day’s menu, in the gestures used to teach songs, and in the over-arching simulation of the program itself. But the most traditionally theatrical moment of the day is Plaisirs d’amour, a “soap opera” performed by counselors in nightly installments. Anticipated by TV-starved campers and attention-hungry staff alike, Plaisirs d’amour has satirized movies and books, featured unforgettable characters and ridiculous plot lines, and ended since time immemorial with its actors jumping fully clothed into Turtle River Lake. It’s a treasured part of the day at Lac du Bois, and this summer we were faced with adapting it to an online format. Just as Kong predicted, narrow parameters spurred innovation for the team of writers and actors devising these virtual performances, which included my colleagues Vanessa, Zé, Marion, Benoît, Sebastien, Emmy, Eliénore, Issac, Edouard, Aurelie, Cécile, and Sido.
 Léa, a returning camper, enters her rabbit Kiwi into the virtual pet show. For the second and third episodes, I took advantage of the pre-recorded format to splice together a brilliantly improvised montage of the protagonist, Minou, training to enter the competition (Minou, it should be noted, was played by Zé, the same genius behind Dr. Ingrédients). For the final episode on Friday, campers entered their own pets, who danced to French music in their respective Zoom squares. Shockingly, Minou still topped the poll, with campers pointing out in the chat that he deserved the win due to his rigorous training regimen. Minou (played by Zé) trains for the cat show. Minou (Zé) and M. Moustache (Edouard) call a "human" guardian (Matilda and Sido). I co-wrote the final week of Plaisirs d’amour with Zé and Marion. Zé suggested that we play with scale and perspective, which we wouldn’t be able to do during an in-person session. This reminded me of the work of my college professor Natsu Onoda Power, who uses live video feeds of puppets in her plays. These ideas snowballed into a storyline involving fairies played by real people and puppets drawn by Zé, resulting in a toy theater extravaganza which eventually incorporated fire, tomato sauce, and a model volcano. I was so grateful to be making theater this summer, and I was energized by the many opportunities the virtual format provided. After months of mourning live performance, it felt good to make art with smart and creative people. In the next few months, should things go according to plan (which they don’t tend to do these days) I’ll be directing virtual scenes for Joy Zimmerman’s directing class at Studio Acting Conservatory and directing a virtual performance of A Doll’s House for Silver Spring Stage. If you had asked me before this summer, I would have been highly skeptical of these plans. But I’m happy to conclude that, though many things are bad right now, virtual theater isn’t always one of them. The Adventures of Cafeteria Written by me, Zé, and Marion, Puppets drawn by Zé Starring me, Benoît, Emmy, Eliénore, and Marion Additional puppetry and camerawork by Sébastien |
