It's not often that you can see creativity unfolding and blossoming right before your eyes. It is even rarer to share this experience with an appreciative audience and to be linked to the creator by blood and history, to have known her since you welcomed her with great excitement into your seven-year old world as your youngest sister.
This was the amazing experience I had on a warm August Saturday in Indianapolis in a small IndyFringe theater, when for the first time I saw my sister Nell perform her new improvisational Story Theater show, "And I Am Not Making This Up."
Each of Nell's shows is different: true improvisation. After a few words with the audience, she begins with some movement, seeming to reach out into the cosmos and gather multicolored threads of memory and insight and humor, and then right before our eyes she weaves them into a tapestry that is greater than its parts. She speaks, gestures and flows, telling vivid stories based on her own experiences and often from the childhood that we shared and did not share. (If you have siblings you may know that one child's family experience can vastly differ from another's.)
She tells of southern Indiana summers, of camp at McCormick's Creek, of her older brother Paul now lost to us, who teased and terrorized her unmercifully as he suffered and battled his own demons, and his final redemption as she finds and holds close a loving memory of him from better days. She shares this memory: when Paul died, the two of us went to the funeral home to say goodbye. With mixed feelings, she touched his cheek. So cold...as cold as snow, evoking a memory of when she was perhaps five and was on big brother Paul's back on a sled speeding down the steep Dewey Drive hill in Ellettsville...icy snow flying in their faces, a fast, scary ride, the laughing tumble off the sled at the bottom of the hill.
She plucks these memories from the air, and weaves them together with another story about her first summer camp, the night hikes in the dark Indiana woods as she clings to her counselor and clutches her gigantic flashlight. Singing camp songs by the creek in the darkness, she imagines a scary maniac, perhaps battling his own demons as he lurks up above in the limestone cliffs and peers down on the tiny campers below. The singing closes with a hymn Nell humorously hums and mumbles, explaining that she never really went to church and so doesn't know the words. In my separate childhood I did go to church, so I know the hymn: "Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Praise him all creatures here below....". And the maniac up in the cliffs is also redeemed it seems, as he rumbles a rusty A-m-e-n at the end of the song.
Emergence of light from darkness seemed to be a theme in the show I saw: fear in the darkness for the tiny campers on the night hike clinging to their flashlights but then turning them off as they sit by the creek singing--the imagined fears the darkness generates. I expected her to tell the tale of the candles set in little boats to float in the darkness down the creek, but she didn't this time. Fortunately I had already heard that memory from another show she did in a woods years ago, and candles were really floated on the water for that one.
Later she tells of the fire balloons set off from the deck behind our house into the darkness, and of the black Labrador madly barking his alarm at a flashlight sent up high into the night sky on a kite string by our equally creative and complicated father.
The most extraordinary part of the performance is to see my sister pluck those images from thin air and thread them together with the themes: darkness and light, loss and redemption. I know she prepares beforehand to get her head into the place it needs to be, to be ready to capture the images on demand on stage, weaving in whatever the audience and ambience might hand her from cell phones ringing to plaintive train whistles in the distance. It is nothing less than a miracle of creation and in August she did it six times over the course of a week or so.
From the darkness of the stage Nell shone her light on images and memories I share with her in patchwork patterns, each of us seeing them through different lenses. Darkness, light, redemption, love, forgiveness. Classic themes, beautifully told. It was a privilege to see.
