Sketch Comedy, Queer Identity, and the Collaborative Process
Like most kids, I grew up with a lot of rules, some straightforward, some confusing. Sit up, tie your shoes, chew your food. Tell the truth, don’t challenge adults. Don’t hit, hit back if they hit first. Be nice, don’t play with Barbies. Charm adults, don’t talk too much. Don’t disappoint your father. Be the person we wanted to be. Be yourself.
School brought more confusing rules. Try new things, don’t make mistakes. Be friends with everybody, don’t hang out with the wrong crowd. Stop holding your books like a girl. Get high scores, play music, be more athletic. Get scholarships. Be yourself.
Strange advice.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped doing creative work. I gave away my saxophone. Books I intended to read started piling up in the corners of my life. My poetry blog languished and was eventually archived. I took 5 months off from performing. Along with the creative practices that had always sustained me, I was also losing my sense of myself.
I realize now I was busy learning something about creativity during this dry spell. All the creative endeavors I loved most came out of community – the work of trying out new moves onstage, the art of layering ideas or words or sounds, or even the effort of understanding a modern novel. By keeping myself a little too busy to connect meaningfully with others, I had shut myself off from their ideas and their encouragement.
So, naturally, I started to lead workshops on this topic. (“Those who can’t do, teach,” is a horrible and very untrue saying that certainly described me at this point.) I started talking to people in creativity- or innovation-driven workplaces about vulnerability and collaboration, about who they collaborated with and why. I read Adam Grant’s Give and Take. I watched the animated show Avatar: The Last Airbender with a good friend. I led a team piloting a new partnership between therapists and teachers.
At each turn, I was learning again to be myself, not in a way that met someone else’s agenda, but in a rule-breaking, grit-testing, bone-tired, can’t-do-it-alone kind of way. I watched people engaged in terribly difficult work (e.g. saving the world by defeating the Fire Nation) ask for help and rely on friends and allies. And I grew, artistically and personally and professionally.
Joining a group of queer writers for the upcoming benefit show at Coalition Theater, Outburst: Queer and Present Danger, was the next right unfolding of that path. Sharing sketches with a group of kind and smart and brave people, without hope of doing it right the first time, is strong medicine for the soul. Especially when that group is cheering for you and staring down their own demons in order to write and share themselves.
I’m a strong believer that we meet ourselves when we tackle difficult things, but these days I’m learning that we also meet ourselves in the faces of others. Renewed and renewing one another. Discovering, and discovered.
TICKETS FOR OUTBURST ARE ON SALE NOW. GET YOURS BEFORE THE SHOWS SELL OUT.