ABBY PAIGE

This summer I’ve been privileged to collaborate with my friend Leah Souffrant on a new performance project, combining our forces to create what we’re calling the LeAB Iteration LAB. During two generative, self-directed residencies in July on Leah’s turf in Brooklyn (thank you, BAX!) and in August close to my home in Burlington, VT, we’ve been exploring our shared creative interests in (among other things) repetition, ritual, routine, silence, and multidisciplinary practice. Letting our differing and overlapping artistic backgrounds bump up against each other in a studio brought all kinds of new ideas to the surface.

Through this research phase of our work together, we developed the first iteration of an experimental movement-based performance, so far entitled A Reiteration in Progress. This week, we presented it to a small invited audience at Burlington’s OFF Center for the Dramatic Arts. They taught us so much — as audiences always do. Their comments have led me to reflect on human agency, how we crave and resist change, the powerful influence of small things. “Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other,” Paolo Freire wrote. I first read Freire in college, where I met Leah thirty years ago. It’s such an immense privilege to live long enough to watch your life spiral back again and again into the same cherished ideas, epiphanies, and limitations. I can’t wait to learn more through this new collaboration within a long friendship.