That’s Adhocracy. Questions that echo.
My father-in-law died ten years ago. I was on the other side of the country at the time for a 9-day residency with emerging playwrights and mentors from around the world. I was twenty-four and an emerging playwright working on one of my first plays. I was a mess in a million and three tiny ways.
Adhocracy didn’t exist in 2009. Maybe it was percolating in someone’s brain, quite probably some grant applications and planning had happened. But the first Adhocracy didn’t come to life until 2010.
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At the beginning of 2010, our staffy jumped the fence and was hit by a car. He died on the road – alone – and our neighbour found him. My son was seven and Bruce was our first family dog. He’d only been in our lives for a week.
Ten years is a long time, but no time at all. A decade. A dream. A question.
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If I think about time for very long at all, I always come back to grief. The layers of it staining the insides of a favourite mug. If I think about grief for very long at all, I always come back to love. The little layers and the big layers and the medium sized layers and the forgotten layers and the lost layers and the found layers and the layers that don’t know how to be layers.
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Future Present was a two-week Adhocracy residency in 2014. I was a participating artist with a handful of other artists from South Australia. Some I knew and some who came into my life through that moment.
My daughter was five weeks old. The first week of the residency I was expressing breastmilk every couple of hours with Rebecca Meston (another Future Present artist - her son is a couple of months older than my daughter) for our absent children, and in the second week my daughter was there in the room with us. Rocked in her pram, wrapped to my chest, held and loved and small and so very new.
It was a residency exploring climate change through the lens of primary production. Thinking about the future. About the present. About legacy and complicity and choices and carbon footprints and wind turbines and art and words.
I thought a lot about milk.
Breasts heavy and painful and leaking. In that first week little plastic bottles half-full of my best effort and in that second week my daughter small and still jaundiced seeking comfort with her tiny mouth.
I thought a lot about love.
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Aeon was my second experience of Adhocracy as an artist. It was 2016 and Aeon was another two-week residency led by interstate guest artists. I was a participating artist with a handful of other artists from South Australia. Some I knew and some who came into my life through that moment.
Aeon was about equal parts love and equal parts transgression and equal parts art-making and equal parts everything in between. And birds. Aeon was about birds too.
About our bodies flocking in space together and finding a path. Making a path. Dreaming a path. Scheming a path.
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I’ve had a bird phobia for as long as I can remember. Sharp beaks and sharp clawed feet staining my nightmares.
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Art takes us where love is.
Art takes us where fear is.
Art takes us where life lives.
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I’m writing this from the softening edges of the Flingers Ranges. I’m here for a 9-day residency with emerging playwrights and mentors from across regional Australia. I’m thirty-four and I’m the Creative Producer of this residency. I’m a mess in a million and two tiny ways.
Adhocracy is celebrating ten years. It’s 2019. I’m not there to celebrate at Waterside with everyone else. My eyes are full of grit and my nose is full of snot. Time moves and it doesn’t move at all.
My son is nearly seventeen and my daughter is already five this year. This year I’m bleeding from old wounds and it’s not blood that comes out but memory. Not blood but milk.
This year I’m curling into myself and the edges of my questions cut me.
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I’m still thinking about the questions Future Present made me ask. Still thinking about the questions Aeon asked me. That’s Adhocracy. Questions that echo.
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In 2014 when I applied for the Future Present residency I wrote a list of fifteen statements about the future.
Number Two said: In the future I will have learned to dance bravely in empty bathtubs across the country.
I’m not there yet.
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Ten years from now is an echo in the shape of a question mark.
In 2029 Adhocracy might be celebrating twenty years. In 2029 Adhocracy might be a memory that leaves a grief shaped stain.
In 2029 I’ll be forty-four. My son will be turning twenty-seven and my daughter will be fifteen.
There will be more grief. More beginnings and more endings. More little love layers.
I’ll probably still be a mess. In a million and one tiny ways.
Alesha, far right, Adhocracy 2014.
