On this lazy, hazy, summery Sunday, I’m all apace, trying to both store up rest, whilst also beginning to pack for the Green Bay Fringe Festival this week. (Look, that’s me with top billing! How’d that happen?!?!)
It’s a completely reworked of Teapot, stripped down completely to its barest parts. Virtually no tech–only the music for the dance at the beginning. After that, just me, a chair, a few costumes. One, epic story.
Three years in, and so many iterations into this journey, I’m really struck by what it means to have a longterm, evolving relationship with a project. This is a new thing for me…to have an old thing. I truly have not had a lot of stability in my life.
That’s one of the themes the Teapot Project spends some time riffing on. How I moved around so much as a kid. Then I had this slew of jobs.
I guess, there were a few chapters in my adult life where I had some places of tying my ship to shore. As a cog in the arts/nonprofit industrial complex, I stayed at two different organizations for more than five years. The fact that I lived in Blacksburg for 9 years, and now Atlanta for 18 years (whoah!) is a long-term relationship. And then there’s the fact that I’ve now been in my house for ten years. StoryMuse will be turning ten at the end of this year. What an accomplishment that’ll feel like when I get there. (Look out for your party invite!)
But the same project? Especially one like this that I got to dream up, cultivate, and get to (have to?) keep returning to over and over again? Inconceivable!
Teapot is a tapestry of many shorter stories I’ve told on stage for years. I first had the little dream of an idea for this project deep in the heart of the first pandemic winter in 2020. Googly eyed from mainlining too much Netflix and Instagram, I’d taken the week between Christmas and New Years for a reset, a complete tech sabbatical. One evening during that week, I was sitting on the couch, doodling, staring out the window, when the memory of a time when I stared out the window, bored out of my mind during a temp job in my twenties came to me. I started musing about all the many, miserable temp jobs I had during my early twenties. Before I knew it, I literally got up, ran over to a notebook, and started sketching out all these awful temp jobs.
The next day, it kept coming to me, clearer and clearer. That whole two-year period of my life, what it had been like as I struggled through this endless string of jobs, trying to find myself, my quote unquote sense of purpose. I kept thinking about how that time as we crept toward the millennium, full of fear and sense of change was not unlike the pandemic in some ways, how we were mired in presidential scandal then too. I thought about how my life as an artist had certain echoes of time back then–the scrappiness, the churn.
The idea sort of simmered in the background as I ostensibly tried to write Walks with Grief. That project, while extremely productive and appreciated, was eventually shelved (for now).
In 2023, for whatever reason, Teapot came bubbling back to life. I had my first campaign fundraiser for it. Boy howdy, people came through! I got all steamed up. The vision became clearer.
By 2024, performing a work-in-progress version at ROOTS Week helped me see the very real potential of the work, how people responded to it, feel a wave of energy as an audience I’d known, people I’ve personally admired for decades came roaring to their feet.
Last spring, the pieces really started falling into place. I got into the 2025 Atlanta Fringe Festival. Found a director with time to work with me. I’d been mulling on what the story threads might be for years, how they would all get woven into that tapestry, but now was the time. We pieced them together into the full 50-minute arc it became.
However, that wonderful director also had a very strong technical background, a vision for slides, music, sound cues. The show started to become this entire unwieldy beast in a way.
The Atlanta Fringe was great. It taught me so much, but performances were uneven because trying to dance together with the tech kept my story delivery unpredictable.
In November 2025, I was in residence for a week at Mondo Bizarro’s Catapult program to continue honing the show. I went there with a clear mandate for myself. I wanted to knit the dance back in that had been a part of the 2024 work-in-progress but which had not made it into the Fringe show. I wanted to experiment with gesture work. I needed better documentation I could use to start selling the show as a workshop/training for organizational retreats and community engagement. I was most desperate to deeply edit and clarify those aforementioned technical aspects so that they became solid, graceful, a value-add, not a distraction.
By and large, all goals were met.
Now, here I am, ready to tour the show to the Green Bay Fringe Festival; it’s evolving yet again. I have new directional support, and this time, I’m really letting go of nearly all that tech I was leaning on. Perhaps some of that tech will come back.
In preparation for GBF, I performed the new iteration two nights for small, invited Atlanta audiences. It was a fascinating mix of folx who’d seen the show before and brand new friends. Some people really loved the way it flowed without the slides. Others missed some of the added nostalgia the slides brought in. Great to know. More to think on and build from in the future!
We also experimented with the workshop activities I’ve been toying around with by having people come for “homeroom” time before the show. I served pizza and juice. We did a craft that led people to tell stories to each other before the show. It was a total success, a model I am just chomping at the bit to try again during future workshops associated with this project.
TBH, I spend a lot of time thinking about attachment theory for my own personal journey and healing. It might even be a part of my next show that’s already steeping in the background–the one about camp & unrequited love!
As I continue my search for the lifelong dance partner I dream of, I’m teaching myself how to have a longterm relationship in my work. Because I’ve always had a sense that the way to stay together meant that you have to learn how to change together, to evolve…to reiterate.