Feeling your way through the dark.

As we enter July, and freedom is the topic of conversation in our homes, in our cities, and in our country, we close out our mini-series reflecting on our Philadelphia production FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT with multi-instrumentalist Asia Mieleszko answering one question: Can you improvise intention?

Improvisation is funny.

An unprompted, unscheduled jam session can yield something so compelling you come back to it again and again for weeks, years even. Lyrics that arrive fully formed on the spot can feel sharper than anything you’ve ever labored over. The absence of any scaffolding can be a blessing. No overthinking. Just instinct.

And yet the stakes change the moment you put it on a calendar. A date and a title means you've implied, maybe to yourself, maybe to people who bought tickets, that there's something worth showing up for – something more than three artists feeling their way through the dark.

If this had just been a night of improvisation between three artists, fine. That’s familiar territory. But this wasn’t that. We had an expectation, spoken or not, that what we made would be cohesive, intentional, maybe even legible to an audience beyond ourselves.

Dan, Lindsay, and I first met over Zoom in November 2025. The show wasn’t until March. On that first call we swapped backgrounds, talked about our practices, circled around ideas without quite landing anywhere. Icebreakers, mostly. Months later, on our second call, things started to take shape. We chose a theme: Freedom of Movement. We ended up talking about borders: political ones, emotional ones, how they’re enforced, how they’re broken down. As our conversation focused on political borders, I remember bringing up natural ones which separate climates and ecosystems like rivers, oceans, mountains, canyons, even wind patterns. Borders divide, but they also define.

We were all delighted to land on Freedom of Movement. It felt current. It felt relevant. And as punchy as it sounded, it still left us with plenty of space to play.

So, our first job was to define what it meant. It sounds straightforward: the ability to go anywhere, unimpeded. But think about it: who, historically, has most believed in their freedom to go wherever they please, unimpeded by the people, the geography, the history already there? The colonizer. The conquistador. The surveyor who looked at land belonging to others and saw only an open invitation. "Freedom of movement" sounds like liberation, but in practice, it has too often presaged entitlement. Obviously, we didn’t want the show to be so naive. 

We carried these questions through March, mulling them over in person 24 hours before doors as we needed to land on what it was we were trying to say, what experience we were trying to invite people into. And the next 24 hours were a marathon. What I didn't expect was how much of the show we made without knowing we were making it. The Zoom calls helped, but the real work happened in between — in the thinking we each did alone, the references we carried into the room, the lunch break eurekas, and ultimately, the performance itself. Our theme wasn't some decision we made and then followed, rather something that kept revealing itself, right up until the end, when the audience was entirely tied up in yarn and I started cutting people loose. Right up until we were eating Swedish fish and cheese cubes at the reception, looking at each other like we'd just gotten away with something.

24 hours before doors, I had no idea what we’d come up with. 10 hours before doors, there were moments where I felt no different than at 24. And then it happened. And then we celebrated at a nearby bar.

The absence of a script forced us to be present, and the presence of a theme forced us to be intentional. That tension — between spontaneity and meaning, between going anywhere and arriving somewhere – turned out to be the show itself.