The road from Prizer to Prizer, pt 1

oh how bittersweet, ye looming deadline

I believe I may owe this community an apology- my hopes and dreams of narrating the lead up to our opening last Friday at Prizer were quite dramatically curtailed by the sheer volume of labor hours required to not only make the pieces for the show- but also keep existing clients from storming the proverbial castle.

This past weekend included my first entire day off (besides the days spent driving to and from Willow House) since June. I’ll leave it at that.

I have been missing this place; my newsletter-writing habitat exists in the center of a Quiet/Low-Urgancy/Rested venn diagram, an of-late entirely elusive eco-system.

So although I missed the opportunity to deliver behind the scenes insights prior to our opening, my intention is to use the time between now and when the show closes to make good on my promises.

I’m extremely proud of what the team put together for our show- I feel as though it’s the best representation yet, in our 10 years of working together, of the symbiotic alchemy that arises via the contraction and expansion of developing ideas in partnership with others.

Which thematically ties into so much of what I’ve been exploring in these newsletters!

I’ll be back with video and photos describing the work in the show, chats with other fort folk and possibly a long incubating chainstitch tutorial. But for now I’ll leave you with a story from the early days of the Fort that I ruminate on regularly and that feels particularly relevant today.

I believe our first year to set up backstage at Newport Folk Festival was 2015? (Apologies here for crappy photo quality, lets just say the graininess enhances the long-ago far-away energy.)

The journey to Newport Folk was long and actually quite internally tumultuous. In the weeks leading up we were all overworked and under-funded, and Christina and Amrit almost Thelma and Louised themselves driving Amrit’s brother in law’s old Ford F150 from Austin to Newport with all our machines and equipment. Nerves were frazzled to say the least.

The night we landed, we set up camp in Dana’s giant Shelter Co tent- we’d been offered a spot to pitch a tent on the haunted grounds of Fort Adams where the festival takes place (but also where one might accidentally wander into an abandoned underground ammunitions storage chamber and never be heard from again) because we couldn’t afford an actual bed in town- we were rolling around back then like an unknown indie band and pinching every penny we could.

Days we spent stitching for 10 hours (or more) without breaks. (I know. Between the 10 or more hour long work days and sleeping on the ground fairly frequently I also can’t believe that the majority of that OG team still puts up with me.)

But after a night or two of ghost-hunting, way-finding and (for some of us) ocean-dipping, we hit our stride and found our syncopated rhythm- and in a random act of picking up a stranded festival attendee thumbing a ride into town post-fest to catch an after party (this is not vernacular those who know me would ever anticipate coming out of my mouth- i am neither a “festival” nor “after party” person, per say) we made ourselves a new friend.

Gabe, our nascent Newport pal, rode into town with us and commenced to spend the rest of the festival in our proximity. He was funny and available to deliver snacks and weather it was the laughter or the calories, he was lovingly folded into the crew.

There was a moment in our first hours running around Newport trying to get into ticketed after parties we held no tickets for where Gabe, trying to keep up with what had to have been a relentless recitation of inside jokes, fast-paced backstage barnstorming and an unwholesome amount of complimentary whiskey- stammered the comment that looms so large in my mind, all these years later.

“You guys have a whole whole-greater-than-the-sum-of-your-parts thing going on here, don’t you?“

We did! I could feel it when he said it. And we do. And…. sometimes we want to strangle each other.

And there are entire months and even years that go by when we wonder what’s next for any single one of us. And who knows what the answer to that question is?

The very asking is a meditation on loosely holding something precious, while simultaneously building a container big enough to explore the boundaries of collectivity without breaking it’s fragile membrane.

As for myself, I can say with resolve and emphatically- that the process of individuating as an artist that has ironically arrived via this collaborative portal has been the most dynamic, expansive and deeply rewarding than that of any single solitary endeavor I’ve embarked upon.

So here’s to the first 10 years! May the next 10 be so rich- but maybe slightly less exhausting.