We came to London with the idea that we might see ghosts, but instead, we left completely enchanted.  This had nothing to do with our own personal charms, but only due to the lovely ambiance at our hotel.  London is a great place to be if you’re with the one you love.  It’s also a great place for ghosts, however.  A few years ago, I came here for a few weeks to work on a laboratory production of a collaborative piece.  We were developing it around the theme of ghosts and memory.  I remember it was a particularly gloomy winter here, and that made it seem even more perfect for the work we were doing.

It would be a year or so until I met my partner, so I was very much alone, and very deep into the idea of playing the part with as much truth as I could muster.  I saw my character as dark, haunted, angry, and very isolated in a kind of self-imposed exile.  I was really very difficult to be around, even more than now, but I really felt that it was for the good of the role I was playing.  Of course, since this was company-created, I was solely responsible for the role I was creating, and it was all up to me, really.  I still acted as though I were suffering for this, having to give up my usual good nature, which is a nature I have never been comfortable in.  I completely forgot that we were also supposed to be working with ghosts, but no one approached me on this, since I was already deep in my artistic suffering.

We were basing some of the work in Corporeal Mime, and it was a great experience for me, because I could see my own obsessions and thoughts spelling themselves out in extraordinary dimensions.  As the time progressed, I could also see my own boring preoccupations for what they were, and sometime before the opening, I panicked.  I was having a very useful and overdue meltdown, and I thought I could not go on because I was not like the thing I was portraying.  Of course, I was that, along with many other things besides, and that was the door that opened up to an interest in ghosts, and an ability to be enchanted.

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