One question project: Micaela Brinsley
How do you find a way to be grounded, as someone navigating changes in cultures, spaces, and environments?
I’ve spent the past few months in a period of time characterized mostly by the feeling of not really knowing who I am. This hasn’t been true, for most of my life. I always thought I was determined and confident, comfortable traversing different kinds of cultural and artistic environments. As a kid, I moved back and forth between two very different countries, the United States and Japan. I was educated in Japanese first and the city of my memory is Tokyo, though my family has been based in Los Angeles, much of them Jewish, for a couple of generations now. Though I always tried really hard to feel comfortable in both cultural contexts, I never felt as if I could be open with myself and others, completely. So, starting when I was really little, I turned to the theatre as the place where I could express myself without fear of judgment or shame. I decided to become a theatre director in high school and trained in it, very, very intensely throughout college and started assisting professional productions while I was still a teenager.
I went to college in New York City and spent the past year assisting the American director, Richard Schechner. I came to the Netherlands in order to make professional connections and build a directing career in Europe. But, I have to confess, that was really a cover, an excuse. The real reason I came to Amsterdam was because a little over a year ago, I learned about Life? or Theatre? a collection of 769 gouaches and 18 extant pieces of fictitious yet confessional narration by an artist named Charlotte Salomon. As soon as I started looking through her work on the website of the Joods Historisch Museum, I felt a kind of electricity, as if I recognized the brain of the work. This really threw me for a loop, since I’d never felt that way about anything before. I couldn’t explain why, but I almost immediately felt I had to spend time learning about her and her work. So that’s the real reason I chose Amsterdam as the place for me to theoretically build my directing career.
As I spent time poring over Salomon’s work and through all the materials in the archives, the question ‘life or theatre?’ took on a new significance for me. Like a snare drum constantly keeping time in the back of my mind, I wandered around this strange and fascinating city, trying to unpack why I’d left everything behind in the United States to research an artist in a country I had no connection to.
I've now realized that all of my ambition for a ‘creative’ professional career as a theatre director was an effort to ignore that I was too scared to show up in the world as myself. I was scared of having to commit to who I could be, regardless of my upbringing. I was scared of being abandoned by people and being vulnerable, of being labeled an outsider. I had chosen a job where from the onset, I knew that my life would be in a constant state of isolation, moving from project to project without ever having to commit to any place or person. As a director, your job is to create a three dimensional event, a live performance out of a text, with the presence and work of your collaborators. The job provided the structure to never make me feel like an ‘outsider’ because I was designing the environment I was building, for whatever show I was guiding, surrounded by co-workers. But now I know that what I thought was ambition was an obsessive, convenient excuse to ignore fear. I was so focused on what projects I wanted to create, I hadn’t given myself the space to ask myself what I really wanted, for years.
In any event, you’re catching me at a strange time. If you asked me this question half a year ago, I could have given you twenty different reasons why and how I stay grounded, but now, I’m not sure if any of it would still be true. Or maybe, I’m just not someone who’s meant to be grounded. This is still new for me, this feeling, but maybe it’s good that finally, I can admit to feeling fluid, freer. Less in pursuit of a rigid idea of who I should be and more open, to seeing what may come when I embrace uncertainty. So I’ll get back to you when I’ve returned to feeling grounded if that happens anytime soon.
About Micaela:
She grew up between the US and Japan. She is twenty-five years old and a lover of caffeine, walks, and the ocean, in no particular order. Micaela is in the midst of transitioning from a very disciplined, regimented career to something else, one she hasn’t decided on yet. She is easily obsessed with people, books, and history. She also likes rum.