 Art shows me the world I want to see, reveals how I want to live. The process of making art teaches me to live better. Putting creations into the world helps me express what's going on inside me, in my life, what I observe in this world, my beliefs when I find it impossible to do so face to face. By sharing the work I make, I can make myself vulnerable in a way that opens me up to connect with others through empathy, and them to each other. When I see art that inspires me, I am reminded of our condition, our world, the irrevocable sense of beauty and truth in each moment.
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That still apply today...  Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash March 23, 2016 Panic does not accelerate productivity. Slowing down helps me see with more attention and sustained focus. There is great creative power in waiting and in doing nothing. Wandering opens up as many ideas as spaciousness. Taking a long time on a project can help me go big with it. I can still pump out material, generate new work and experiment with several improvised pieces a day. The process is becoming about the long haul. How I sustain, how I balance out the creative, the professional, the personal. We handle grief in innumerable ways. The ways I handle grief over time changes. Opening up, taking down walls and allowing for vulnerability makes way for connection. It's uncomfortable to be vulnerable. The discomfort zone is where learning happens, where magic happens. I can only sit for so long without upsetting my body and brain for the rest of the day. I need to move and find new positions for myself in order to engage holistic learning, teaching and making. I am a total maniac. I know how to make massive quantity, how to write a lot and create a ton, and that is an exquisite practice to have under my belt, but now my challenge is learning to do less and in that way do better. I have a mountain of experience under me and when I don't recognize that, I stand tiptoe on top of that peak, unbalanced, about to fall to bottom. I am privileged in many ways. Marginalized in a few. I can walk into a room recognizing the areas in which I am privileged and use those to help lift up the marginalized in the room. Instead of listening for contention or to interrupt, listen for understanding. Pay attention to a room -- Does someone need to step forward? Does someone need to step back? Reflection is as important as planning and acting. When questions drive the work, the work creates more questions. We can explore deeper to make those questions better all the time. At the roots of everyone's work are a few core questions. Finding out what drives us means asking what enrages, inspires, makes us curious, brings us joy, makes us laugh and then tapping into those answers. Generating material is only the first part -- then comes reworking, redrafting, feedback, queering, showing, rewiring... All the parts that play with the work take the longest. That final 5 percent it takes to finish a work really does take 95 percent of the time. A play that taps into shared perversity is more compelling than one that investigates psychological motivations. Asking where am I? each moment can bring deeper awareness and presence and is an easy way to slip back into a conscious mind frame when the spinning option steals my breath. Finding ONE thing, one focus at every given moment leads to greater groundedness in the work. Art matters. I know what I'm doing. I'm on the path to creating a lifelong process that works well for me. Great art has roots and reach.  Photo by Eugenio Mazzone on Unsplash At first I thought I wouldn't share these this year, but now before we get too far into 2020, here are some of my highlights from 2019. It's good to look back. Highlights:
Here are my three big goals for 2020 and 2021: 3 Big Goals for the Next Two Years:
2020 is my year of finding presence, rather than worrying over the future or running reels of the past through my brain. That's my intention, anyway...we'll see how it goes :)  A sweet waterfall and (delicious proposal site) at the top of Perseverance Trail in Juneau New Project Survey
My amazing sister Kate Kraay and I are collaborating for the first time on a theatrical project. Well -- besides the times we performed renditions of fairy tales with our brother for our parents when we were growing up. I remember playing Gretel opposite my brother's Hansel when I was six, with Kate graciously taking on the witch's role...
Now we're a little older, devising a new play/performance/thing together and could use your help as we begin. We'll be exploring the effects of stress on the body, women's bodies in particular, in comparison with the effects of stress on our planet, stress caused by humans in particular. Your insights through the survey questions below will be most helpful in giving us more direction, context and research. 
Photo by NASA on Unsplash
You are welcome to take this survey whoever and wherever you are. Though we are most interested in responses from individuals who identify as womenx, non-binary, transgender or gender non-conforming, if you are a human who has lived in this world, we appreciate your answers. And if you know someone who may have a lot to say about these questions, do consider sharing it with them. Thank you! Learn more/respond below, save the form for later on a new page or share it using this link (https://forms.gle/8qw4ReXwR6vnYywA9). Thank you so much for your time and insights! If you have questions, feel free to reach out through my contact page. Many thanks, Heidi and Kate As I find myself at a pausing point in the play I'm working on after this glorious summer of writing, developing, researching, exploring and rewriting rewriting rewriting, I think back to my last solo-written full-length play How to Hide Your Monster and what I was thinking about around this time in 2015. At the end of that summer, I similarly found myself unsure of my next steps, knowing I'd gotten as far as I could go before getting outside feedback.  Ah, that fresh ink feeling. Both How to Hide Your Monster and my new play, see in the dark, bring in monsters that resemble this ink obsession of mine. I think about crystalizing my voice. I think about cracking the earth, opening it with care. I think about the job of an actor. How much it teaches me as a writer to watch what a person can do onstage, fully present in each moment. I fall down watching. Writing used to be what I did to get the desperation out. I had to put my story into words. Now the next step: getting that story out to the world. I've done it step by step, getting the fiction out in pieces through plays, stories, essays and poems. Now with this play I'm trying to get up the courage to speak with more specificity and openness about who I am and where I've been in person, onstage, outside the veil of fiction. Fiction can tell the truth in magical ways. More powerful is its ability to get me to accept where I've been and to name it out loud. To learn from my mistakes and to see my failures. Enduring humiliation and failure is important for everyone. What we do with that is important. If we didn't accept our failures and successes, we wouldn't learn. Terrible mistakes get made and they should be acknowledged. There is a big difference between "I failed" and "I am a failure." Celebrate those failures. Those are my teachers. They are for me. Successes are for the audience.  More fresh ink. I watch my breath, my frame. I think worldwide of people hungry in the mud faces in cages heartbeats dead families capsizing in escape.  Photo by Aswin Deth on Unsplash. When I was young, hearing my first tragic events, my response was massive guilt and shame. I had it okay while lives cracked apart across the world, in my neighborhood. And then I hurt myself. And got addicted to hurting myself. Now, here, globally, in this country, cruelty happens daily. I am healthy. I have enough. More than enough. I want to help. Instead of saying, they suffer so I must suffer, I want to say I am at peace, how can they be at peace? Instead of my limbs paralyzed, instead of acting against myself, I can reach out and take care of me and thereby reach out stronger. I don't have a lot. I have enough. I can be here for you. I can sit in the same room as you. I can listen to your story. Open up the world for you. Help you tell your story. Get people to listen. Or try. Bring communities together. Try. I sometimes feel so young. I doubled my gray hair the last ten weeks. Still breathe, still be. And reach. Open. Continue to open. I wrote myself out of abuse, out of disorder, out of homelessness, out of numbness. find vitality Meaning exists in every moment because we say so. We create meaning by collecting observations. strip down do less show less That's where I find beauty, elegance. Simplicity is my way to wholeness. I am already whole. I feel my back pulse. neurons can rewire brain chemistry can shift A diagnosis said I was hardwired to need antipsychotics forever, that I would never be stable not really. I learn daily my neurons' plasticity. All thanks to repetition. Yes I get tempted to work longer to stay deeper in screens but that doesn't help me. I'm learning to stop sooner. pace stay healthy shift take time to breathe the blue the bicycles a ringing bell resist the urge to control hear the music of stillness I'm captured by cremated energy. keep it small your day will thank you I know you're addicted let go your body/brain will thank you  Photo by Michelle on Unsplash I invest in the edge between brutality and beauty. I write until I run out of ink. I work until I run out of life. I want to perform confidence. It's no longer a luxury. It is what I need in order to do the job I must do. I need to pull in the authority and believe I know what I'm doing. Say what is on my mind. Listen. Let that be enough. I give away my time a lot to help others with little things because I feel I should. This is a distraction. I need to hold each activity in my palms and sit with it. Marie Kondo it. Ask, does it give me joy?  Marie Kondo-ing my life. Photo by Samantha Gades on Unsplash And if not, and especially if it also doesn't feed my belly or build bridges, I can let it go. Each thing I take on has several elements inside. Going deeply into them takes me away from other things. I don't want to do any of it halfway. I want to immerse in each job, not fall apart, not take it on the surface level. I want to aim higher, go big. Survey for New Play
My next full-length play, see in the dark, will explore how we handle the threat of outsiders and ask the price of suspicion versus compassion.
How does it feel to be an other or outsider? How does it feel to perceive others as outsiders? Photo by Alexis Chloe on Unsplash
As research for see in the dark, I'm asking some anonymous questions in the survey below. I'd love your input, as in-depth or quick as you'd like. You don't have to answer all the questions, but I appreciate your input toward any of these topics. You can also write answers to any/all of these questions below in the comments section, over email through my contact page, or if we're connected on Facebook/Twitter. I'll embed the form below and here is a link to the survey. Thank you for your insights! By posting answers, know that your ideas, experiences and words may be used in this new play. Thanks again! Heidi Kraay Happy New Beginnings, everyone! Here are some of my highlights from last year. I'm very glad to be in 2019, but there were some sweet moments to look back on from 2018, for sure, some that I'd forgotten. Highlights:
Here are my three big goals for 2019 and 2020: 3 Big Goals for the Next Two Years:
2019 is my year of compassion, generosity and gratitude toward myself and others.  Happy New Year from a friendly neighborhood Sasquatch near Hope, British Columbia.  And from me! Photo Credit: Sarah Ann Gardner |
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$1, $10, $100, whatevs :) Heidi KraayProcess notes on a work in progress (me). This mostly contains raw rough content pulled out of practice notebooks. Occasional posts also invite you into the way I work, with intermittent notes on the hows and whys on the whats I make. Less often you may also find prompts and processes I've brought to workshops, as well as surveys that help me gather material for projects. Similar earlier posts from years ago can be found on: Archives
May 2022
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