“Suppose a character, in one of the stories you and I write, tried to conceive of his origin, and tried to foresee beyond what he knows of his destiny at any given point of the story. His enquiries, his speculations, would lead him to hypotheses (infinity, chance, indeterminacy, free will, curved space and time…) very similar to those at which thinkers arrive when speculating about the universe.

This is why the traffic between storytelling and metaphysics is continuous.”

--from and our faces, my heart, brief as photos

“Where are you from? What do you do?” These are difficult questions to find answers to. And the man in front of me is waiting for me to give him one.

“I’m from…” I begin to answer. Hold on, I don’t know where I’m from. Often people want to know where your home is when they ask this. Where is home, then? I don’t know. Home exists in a perpetual state of uncertainty for me. I was born in New York, moved to Tokyo then Hong Kong and spent most of my life in Singapore until my father moved to Bangkok and I hopped to Boston for four years before cycling back around to New York.

Ah, good. “New York.” I think. That must be home. Maybe because the idea of a return to an origin appeals to me. That’s where I am now, after all. The place where I was born and am just now beginning to live. I’ve finally cashed in on the return flight.

But why does New York feel like home? What does New York remind me of? I look out at the other people gathered today in the park. People together, people alone. People shouting, people saying nothing at all. Lovers, loners, strangers, acquaintances. Over my shoulder I hear the faint whisper of a siren.  “New York reminds me of the process of the theater.” I realize. Chaotic but intimate. Spontaneous but deliberate.

The only question I can ask when making theater is: Is it alive? Perhaps the question may seem reductive but the answer is never cut and dry. Theater can take place anywhere, in any language, with no language, with anything and everything, everything and nothing. Sometimes it is living. Sometimes not. What makes it alive? This is a mystery. The transformative power of theater is mysterious. As is New York. But I feel alive in New York. And I feel alive making theater. For me, theater is the remedy for an insatiable and restless curiosity. It permits me to be a child again.

“What do I do?” Theater is what I do, I suppose. And a theater anywhere feels like home. In a way, it makes sense—what I do has become my home. And so, I’ve realized, in the seconds that have turned to minutes standing in front of the man who is still waiting for my answer:  home can be anywhere. For me, it is usually a place sprawled out on the floor of a rehearsal room. Or a red seat on the far right of the last row of a big, big theater. Or this bench in Central Park.

I don’t necessarily know where I am or where I am going, what I am doing nor where I am from. But I’d like to think that’s just where I want to be. Everywhere and nowhere,

Hello, New York. Welcome home.

CALLA VIDET creates original works for the theater in New York. She graduated from Harvard University magna cum laude in a special concentration combining physics and theater. Her final directorial project and senior thesis—The Space Between—premiered on the mainstage of the American Repertory Theater in April of 2009 and told the story of the making of the atomic bomb through the lens of the Orpheus myth. In New York, her work has been seen at Dixon Place, the Living Theatre, HERE, Theater for the New City, and the Gene Frankel Theatre. As a writer and director, she is interested in all forms of theater, explorations of time in space, the magic of a rehearsal room—and is drawn particularly towards collaborative, interdisciplinary and devised work.

Calla has also directed productions of Moira Buffini’s Dinner, Complicite’s The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol, Sarah Kane’s Blasted (ass. director) and Complicite’s Mnemonic. She is the recipient of Harvard’s Louis Sudler Prize for the Arts , an Artist Development Fellowship, and is a member of Lincoln Center Directors Lab.
 
She resides in New York City but can also be found frequently in Bangkok—where her family lives—dodging motorcycles and trying to master all five tones.