I tend to get pretty wound up about two weeks from opening. The material that we have so carefully gathered no longer makes sense to me. I forget what it was that made me really want to do the piece in the first place. Questions mount, solutions are harder to grasp, and all I see are shortcomings.

This time around, its been particularly bad. Even affected my sleep, which is pretty rare. Sleep is something I can usually rely on. Not this past week.

But its been a good week in rehearsals. We’ve been solving problem spots, addressing questions, reworking and tightening the material to reflect our deeper connections to the piece. And at the end of rehearsal today, we FINALLY have a clear, clear picture of how this work needs to wrap up. Its been particularly elusive this time around, and we have tried very hard to not stick an ending on this. The sections have come flying in from all directions, and we have been trusting that the threads that brought these sections forward were connecting to one another, and now we think we have a vision of what it leads to.

It came unexpectedly, after we had run all the material we have so far for our composer Ljova. We listened together to a song that had been suggested as an ending, and as we took it in, and discussed it, an ending that was markedly different in tone emerged. It feels more complicated in feeling, less describable in words, softer in energy and much more distilled as an image, than previous plans have felt. It feels complete, and it feels like an unexpected realization of impulses that have given rise to the emotional core of the work in rehearsals.

We discovered something today…its what this is all about, but it doesn’t always happen. It has taken a year of physical work to come to this distillation of the finished work. I’m simply ecstatic it didn’t take us a year and two weeks.

Here’s to everyone out there looking to figure something out. My hope for you is that the answer comes in time for you to implement it. Thanks.