In Canada, they have Newcomer Centres. They are places for immigrants and refugees to take classes, make friends, get help filling out documents. The Newcomer Centre I arrived at last week in a sun-baked strip mall in Northeast Calgary was an impressively large physical presence, over five stories tall. When I entered the small conference room to work with the newcomer youth on their personal storytelling projects, they were all waiting in the room in a circle.
“There’s the Jesus I’ve been waiting for,” said one of the teenage boys, as I walked in the door. I laughed and shook his hand, stroking my beard and long hair in recognition of his joke. I had worked with these students over zoom and then in person in the winter. Now I was back for a few more days of in-person interaction. When I began last winter, I started with writing and storytelling exercises. This worked to a point for some of the youth, but some struggled. This time, I focused on engaging their bodies to begin telling stories. To utilize their physical presence.
Instead of doing sense memory writing prompts, we got up on our feet and I led them in the physical and vocal warm-up I do everyday before I start rehearsing and every night before a performance. It marks the transition from a conscious, intellectual engagement with the world to a visceral, imaginative, and physical vocabulary.
One day, I performed excerpts from my shows Border People and Each And Every Thing. In the post-performance Q&A, Pratim (who along with his wife Pallavi, are leaders of the project and decorated professors at University of Calgary), and I talked about the power of embodied performance to summon or channel other bodies and realities into the room.1 Some of those stories are immigrant and refugee stories, and there were many laughs of recognition. But it was seeing the physical transformation combined with the audience’s collective imagination that most impacted the youth. One young woman said she would never forget the experience for the rest of her life.
And this didn’t happen in a theater. It was a small auditorium that was wildly echoey and didn’t have much lighting. We tilted the recessed lights towards the raised platform. We brought in landing mattresses from the climbing wall to help absorb sound. We took black curtains from another room and thumb-tacked them up to create a backdrop. I told everyone to imagine the sound cues. And we made theater.
Humans are physical beings who thrive on in person connection. We were starved of this for many months during the early pandemic, and I thought live theater would roar back once we were allowed to congregate again. I was quite wrong. Live theater is in crisis. Last year, only 5% of Americans reported having attended a theatrical performance, down from 10% pre-pandemic. People are flocking back to ballgames and concerts, but theaters are closing and contracting all across the country.
Theater can happen wherever there is collective heightened attention. It can happen in a big building with lots of resources. I love performing in those places. I also love performing for refugee youth in an echoey auditorium in a strip mall.
Because the next day the long form improvisational scenes they created based on their experiences were off the charts creative and embodied. There were scenes about the first day of school in Canada in which some played characters based on themselves two years ago when their English was limited and halting. About ordering coffee for the first time at Starbucks that turned into a captivating tableau of modern urban life.
The youth were born and raised in many different places—Pakistan, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Angola, Nigeria, and Syria. Most are women who have come from very conservative societies and have had limited agency in their lives. Some have endured years of religious persecution and resulting isolation. And yet here they were launching into full-throated characters, inhabiting agitated coffee baristas, self-involved office-workers, homeless folks wandering into the café asking for change, lawyers threatening to sue the café, harried policeman trying to keep the peace. Investing in physicalities, completely lost in the make-believe world that is very much based on their experiences in this new place called Canada.
Then we did story circles, and all kinds of new details emerged. They didn’t have to think about what had happened to them, about what story to tell. The details poured out, because they had transported themselves back through their imagination, and through their engagement with their bodies.
The next day, Pratim took me to the Canadian Rocky Mountains, an hour away. We sat on the shores of a pristine alpine lake and talked, as different groups of outdoorsy Canadians communed with nature along the shoreline every twenty yards or so.
One family settled in next to us, a little too close, a little too loud, with a little too much stuff. They were a sweet seeming three generation family. Mom had a gregarious cackle of a laugh with a big Canadian accent. The Grandson looked to be about my son’s age. But they had nudged into our space, without saying anything or establishing a connection.
Eventually I swam out and back across the lake, and they remarked about this. I noticed Grandson’s Red Sox hat, and shared my memory of going to Fenway Park when I was seven, and that I’ve taught my son to pronounce it like the locals do, with a hard Boston A. Grandad, who grew up near Boston, laughed. The initial contested vibe evaporated. We were now no longer having a parallel, cramped afternoon hang, but a shared experience in the commons.
We had to walk our bikes back, but the family had occupied the narrow stretch of ground by the lake where we’d walked in. We tried going up over the hill, but it was too treacherous. So Grandad Ken and his son Zach, who were wearing water shoes, offered to ferry our bikes back. Before we could protest, they grabbed our bikes and walked them two hundred yards to where the road widened again and we could walk our bikes. It was a remarkable gesture of kindness.
I thanked Grandad Ken, and then we fell into a conversation about his life. He was facing the sun, so he maintained a hard squint. He was built like a stack of bricks, held his arms crossed over his broad chest, and sucked air through pursed lips every minute or so.
He had retired three years ago, his last gig working the oil fields up in “Fort Mac,” one of thirteen different jobs he’d had. He talked about the transition after decades of working. How it was hard to find himself again.
As he got more personal, he broke his cross-armed, squinting stance, and began moving his body, expressing this struggle physically. He didn’t look out at the horizon and analyze it with barrel-chested stoicism. As often happens when we observe people closely and without judgement, they open up and begin saying and moving in ways that are not pre-meditated. He was moving as though wrestling his thoughts into place, wriggling and pulling his arms through the air. He finished with a final arm pull and duck down and said, “It took a while to get back into myself.” Then he looked up as though coming out of a mini-day dream.
I smiled and said, “that’s a beautiful answer, Ken, thank you.” And we biked off along the path. As we biked back up the paved road to the car high above the lake, I saw Ken and family hundreds of feet below on the shoreline. I called out, “Hey!” and saw the flash of light on his bald pate and heard a “hey!” and then a murmur and then his daughter-in-law’s big cackle. She didn’t need to say anything. I knew it was her laugh, we’d been sharing physical space all afternoon. She was hundreds of feet away, and her cackle was still an intimate benediction.
In Each And Every Thing I also play myself and Pratim as we grew up together over the last twenty years. So I got to perform Pratim and myself having these moments of discovery and connection for both him and this group of youth who are now in a refugee youth project he has co-created partially based on ideas we first stumbled on together.
Oh, I enjoyed this so much! Now I want to know if there are Newcomer Centres in San Francisco, I have been a volunteer reading tutor to “newcomer” students in Middle schools. I loved meeting them and guiding them through some of the weirdnesses of American English! Thank you Dan.