Intersection

Intersection is a deeply human human trait. Not agreement. Not sameness.

It's vitally important that different trajectories meet while remaining different. A rehearsal room works this way (when it's working). So does a city. So does a relationship. So does thought itself.

The philosophers Deleuze and Guattari were drawn to these unstable meetings in their own ways. Their work resists the idea that identity, meaning, or culture should settle into fixed territories with defendable borders. Instead, they describe assemblages, temporary gatherings of bodies, histories, gestures, spaces, desires, habits, and social forces. We are not singular objects moving through the world. We are intersections already.

This is politically, artistically, and personally relevant to our capacity to "move" or move others.

Culture often pressures people toward coherence. Pick a lane. Define yourself. Find your group. Stay recognizable but on "these" terms. Yet lived experience rarely behaves this way. Most people inhabit contradictions. We move between professional identities, emotional states, languages, classes, generations, and communities. Interactive media makes this even more prevalent. We are altered by encounters. The self is porous and we rarely take the opportunity to see ourselves as different.

Deleuze argues that repetition without difference becomes deadening. I think older cultures, that didn't see our leisure time as a resource or a market, had the a very healthy sense of this. Festivals, processions, carnivale, and prescribed "oddness" can be found in almost every regional village in some parts of the world. Guattari expands on this when he discusses social life, asking how individuals and groups might escape rigid systems that trap desire into repetitive roles. Creativity and freedom can't really emerge from isolated pondering. It has to come from unexpected conjunctions.

You can feel this in collaboration. Rehearsal lets you carry one set of instincts; a director carries another; the text carries another; the room offers obstacles and insights. Something new appears through interference and presence. Not sequentially or logically. Through relation.

This is why deeply homogenous environments become strangely fragile. When people share the same assumptions, codes, and emotional vocabulary, there is little friction capable of generating transformation. And in these environments, transformation can be seen as the threat.

Deleuze and Guattari use the image of the rhizome to help us understand how transformation can occur. Rhizomes are a kind of plant that differs from tree-like plants. A rhizome has a root structure without a single center. Unlike a tree, which organizes itself from trunk to branch out and upward, a rhizome spreads laterally. Any point may connect to any other point. Knowledge, identity, and culture often function this way beneath the official narratives imposed upon them.

Theatre, I argue, is more rhizomic than distributed media. A stage gathers strangers into temporary relation in real space. It asks incompatible energies to coexist long enough for form to emerge and communal experience to take hold.

Performance itself is intersection made visible. It's body and text, memory and present tense, private feeling and collective presence. It is a living contradiction.

Difference is not the obstacle to togetherness. The refusal of relation is.

One task of everything we do, whether in art or in the home, is to keep intersections open long enough for something unexpected to pass through.