Noses around the neck, balls and scarves fly through the air and music plays loud.

Entering the space, there are more things in the air than ever. Some groups are passing tennis balls around, while Mycah is teaching some people more advanced juggling. Some people are sticking to their scarves. We partner up and switcheroo to talk about what's going on and what we're doing. 

The same song has been on repeat for some time now. Bababababababbabababa bird is the word.

This song is really getting on everyone's nerves. What kind of song is this? Mycah tells us to make an ensemble piece in 15 minutes, using the lyrics of the song to create a dance and taking our juggling and our scarves to make a game. The ensemble throws around ideas and tries them out. Surfing, juggling, flapping like birds, throwing the tennis ball at each other. 

The music gets turned off. It's too much. The ensemble starts to ask questions. How are we interacting with the audience? How did we feel during certain moments? 

Maybe we need bird solos... who are the birds?

This is a process of figuring out the rules for the games we've been playing. But there are more pressing questions. What's next? There's a spiral scene, a hatching scene... How do we end? The answer ends up being pretty simple. We do what we do best... we do what we have. The ensemble performs the Bird is the Word Piece, and at its height, the noses come off. 

We sit and talk about what we just saw (and did) and how we can use it. How did it feel to work without Mycah, as an ensemble? Was it scary/don't care/eh/somewhere in the middle--it's all fine. The work we're doing here is to destabilize actor training outside of a institutional setting for actors like us. Mycah, as the teacher, is slowly phasing himself out, watching and seeing what the ensemble can cook up. 

We do everything we can. We set rules and codify costumes and movements. What we are really doing is responding to the ritual of creating shared language on stage. Which is the act of creating togetherness and community. There's rules and codes, but there's no right or wrong or any rush. There is, however, status. A status innate to each of us, like levels. We cook with what we got, but we can also play and give ourselves over to the edge of being the opposite status. We do everything to open all possibilities and changes. 

We're constantly unfolding to ourselves, being curious in moments of complicity.

Mycah backs away as the group sits in a circle and unpacks what we talked about. So the group talks about the discussion and how they got to where they did depending on what they know happened. Mycah sits and watches, along with the Outside Eyes, as the group gets into the space of interrogating the work. The piece cooks and cooks and cooks. 

Some outakes...