Burnt Out and Loving It June 2026
“I think you’re burnt out.” - Atlas Wu, 2026
The conversation leading up had been winding footpaths, soft spoken answers for a meditation scene in Carla Ng’s Hug Piece. We lay on the wooden studio floor, scuffed, swept, but holding at least 100 years worth of dirt. The purple lighting alternated with gold as Carla adjusted the lights. Just outside the square windows on the upper part of the turn of the century doors, turquoise tile work diagonally guides the staircase leading up to the outside. After the run of the show in front of the invited audience of four, feedback and ice cream were prioritized.
Stanely Arts 2026 image by S. Sullivan
“We cut the Body Scan scene because it was too yoga, too woo-woo, too something.” Carla stated. “The gap that’s currently there works.. but I feel like we’re missing something.”
“We something need it to be an arrival, an invitation to rest. In a hug, your nervous system relaxes,” I said. “We’re giving the audience time to process, physically and mentally.” Thoughts drifted back to 20 minutes prior, the blonde woman in the long black off shoulder dress I had just hugged in the informal sharing. My arms reached up over her shoulders, my hands spread across her shoulder blades with light pressure.
“Can we breath…?”
“….Who do you usually hug?” I ask her. My chin rests a little heavier into her shoulder.
“My best friend, I’m usually the instigator of it.” Strange, as she hugged me around my waist. Usually when I instigate a hug, I throw my arms around someone’s shoulders.
“So you’re offering the support in the hug… do you feel like here because of our orientation, you’re still in the support role?”
“No, this feels pretty equal.” I let out a big exhale as my body settled.
She couldn’t have known how much I needed this hug. That actually she is in the supporting role still.
I ask her the question seminal for Hug Piece.
“What’s the one thing you need to hear….”
CPT Hug Piece Show 2026 Image by Kit McCarthy
From an audience perspective, Hug Piece is all risk. How vunerable are you willing to be with strangers, is it worth the risk? It’s an audience participatory fringe work - everyone in the room will hug each other at one point or another. Carla talks about her experiences as a trans woman and immigrant. She describes a difficulty with small talk at her theatre ushering job when first arriving to the UK with current day struggles. Craving closeness, but every time she opens herself up to new people or even on the tube, they’re fucking her over with either a hate crime or avoidance to emotional intimacy. Carla is genuinely one of the best human beings to have ever existed - she is fiercely loyal and generous. She is the true embodiment of love as direct action in art-making.
Kiwi Portal Tech 2026 Image by Kit McCarthy
A week prior, Carla and I sat in a toy shop in Archway rigging lights and teching my first one woman show. Kiwi Portal was intense to say the least, I’d been sleeping on Carla’s couch for three days between moving flats and quitting my day job. Rehearsing this piece with dreams, reliving heart break, and shibari studios. A dear NYC punk telling me to ‘be who your younger self needed,’ and a cross dresser in the middle of nowhere handing down sage wisdom, ‘to choose yourself.’ Our one rehearsal in the Samuel Beckett Room at Riverside Studios, I cried during the final ‘Steve’ scene three times. At 11:20pm - the city erupting around us as Arsenal had won, lighting bars bounced shadows against shelves upon shelves of dolls and vintage toys. I lay next to a red and cream dollhouse, exchanging caring gestures (HUGS) with a giant Eeyore plush playing the role of an ex lover. We looked at each other and giggled. “How did we even get here?”
“Don’t know - I started talking to you and Jo in the Guildhall common room.”
“Started talking to Jane about the one woman show in my bedroom, she said to have it here.”
Kiwi Portal Tech 2026 Image by Kit McCarthy
Kiwi Portal as a work in progress sharing and first go out went well - we judged success by “did anyone get bored?” It was something completely new for everyone involved. The showing illuminated which styles merged well together, what works, what needs development. The events of Kiwi Portal straddle the line between raunch and earnest measurements on wanting to be in love. Live a fantasy like Aurora in an Eyvind Earle square tree-d forest. The narrative is a coming of age story, but the experience of the show itself was an actual coming of age as well. A toy shop, gorilla theatre lighting rig, teaching everyone a dance from when I was 5, talking about the most unhinged and vulnerable synchronicities that have completely changed my relationship to love, money, career, art…everything. The next couple days I went about my business like everything was fine, this was just another performance. However, I felt awful. Like I didn’t want to be witnessed, seen, or spoken to in my daily life. I wasn’t ashamed or embarrassed. My body was having a very physical reaction to being thrown back into life after experiencing something… full of risk. In 2019 I took a workshop with Holly Farmer in Long Beach who specializes in somatic practice and movement. She said something along the lines of “In the modern age, Body doesn’t know the difference between what historically feels like BEAR! and oh I”m not too sure if this person likes me or not. Yes, we’ve evolved, but Body still responds physically to threat like we would have thousands of years ago. Be kind to Body, give it time to catch up.”
As our break began after HUG feedback, Jess handed me a nativity scene sculpted our of flour from her most recent trip home, to Equidor. Jess and I met in October at at Carla’s Halloween party.
Personals:You were: The Riddler. I was: Sexy Einstein on the Beach (Black Fishnets, Robert Wilson and Philip Glass as pasties, g-string painted to look like the lighting design for Knee 5, Child’s choreography for’ Switzerland 1942’ as a headband. The Party Theme: Come as a cocktail.
We reconnected while working on her performance piece ‘Is this a club?’ in February. Situating the inspiration for the piece, Jess was curious about community or love while out late. We’d have dance parties to reset our nervous systems between discussions and problem solving. Important milestones for both of us in sharing process and a friendship forming. Gasolina plays. Our energy? Through the roof.
ITAC Rehearsal 2026 Image by S Sullivan
Jess is my favorite type of person - authentic. Someone so authentic it’s easy love them. Love as a verb, love as completly unapologetic and generous honesty. At our first rehearsal, I remember getting emotional on her concrete studio floor covered in sawdust, and dancing full out to Madonna. We cut out words she’d written and poems, shared how to construct a research wall of DOOM for sorting information. Discussed about recent breakups, failed relationships, humiliation in public and private settings.
I believe Kiwi Portal was born this night. Winter 2026 was a long and lonely one, a second Christmas alone in a flat, long calls home, falling out of love with life, and freezing my ass off. Those rehearsals reminiscing on what we thought being a young woman would be like when you’re a kid - to our dismay not a Madonna or Janet music video. These rehearsals were pure light.
Re: Gasolina. We relate on how at 15, every weekend is a Quince. While Jess is born in the UK, overall London lacks the Chicana // Latin American cultural awareness that California might have. There are pockets of community, but not every pub party has Aunties doing meringue. Home, space, and place. For Jess, that place of familiarity, joyful common ground is Equidor. To find rest, respite. The morning after the first Hug Piece in March, I sat in her kitchen in my sharpie coveralls, still recovering after the night before. I had (unconfirmed but most likely) been drugged at a club. We were prepping for the second showing of her piece that weekend, we both revisited this deep need for rest. Needing to go home, bad. To reset.
Now in May, I looked down at the colorful market stall purchase in the studio of Stanley Arts. Holding a gift from her home was precious, an object that marked a the end of a journey of longing. When I looked up, to finish our conversation, she was standing in the doorway with Carla. “COME ON aren’t you coming? We’re getting ice cream!” I stood still. Processing. I couldn’t process the sequence of actions fast enough, it was as if my surroundings and friends had become stop motion. Or like when your sweater catches on the door handle when you’re running out. I needed to stand next to the stacks of chairs on the side of the studio a little longer, holding this flour sculpture of Mary, Jesus, and Joseph. My body was confused. Tension - pulled away from a tender moment and a sacred object. Pulled closer another tender moment sitting on a wall with friends and Tesco ice cream. I felt like something important had happened, and somehow we moved too. fast.
“I’ll be right behind you, I’ll catch up don’t worry.”
The progress sharing for Hug Piece went… well the next the showing during the residency was amazing. The office people from the venue during heat wave didn’t seem in the mood for camp, Cher, or hugging as there was a massive heat wave. I had put on a smile, made sure my hugs were real, brought the energy for my friends. But professionally I wasn’t feeling like who I wanted to be - even if the audience was four people for an informal sharing. I didn’t realize how emotional I would be, hugging the woman in the black dress while performing so soon after Kiwi Portal just days before this. That scene we spent so long trying to fix during the debrief on Hug Piece, that in a piece with high risk for the audience, can we offer a place of reflection, and arriving with your thoughts and body? That space to process?
The conversation with Atlas in the final moments of our studio debrief as we packed our bags and walked out:
“I just… it was difficult being watched today. Like I wasn’t in the room. Like I had nothing to give anymore.”
“I think you’re burnt out.”
I had not gifted myself or Body a space to process. No arrival to give thoughts and physical form time to remould. I had’nt gone home, or even taken a day off post Kiwi yes, but more importantly post anything emotional from the past months. I’d been harming myself with journey after journey after journey with no arrival. No break. Emanations of Disfigurment into Is this a club? into stage managing a show, Hug Piece 1, Kiwi Portal … Touch and go, sprinting, hand to mouth. In life this year, I’ve risked more and more each month. Artistically, physically, personally. Freezing in the studio in front of Jess wasn’t a misunderstanding or evidence of misalignment, it was a genuine glitch in my own matrix responding to a deep need to stop. Body said no.
"Ends come of themselves. When you sit down you are in too much of a hurry to do so. You drive right for the end. Don't think about the end! Don't think about sitting down! What you do want to do, however, is to think of the means that are right for you to attain the end."
FM Alexander
… So, what makes you, arrive?
What’s the thing you need to hear, right now?
I love you
I’ve got you
Kiwi Portal Bow 2026 Image by Kit McCarthy
… how can Body know this too?
Hug.
Hug Piece CPT Tech 2026 Image by Kit McCarthy
One last thing…
excerpt from Carla Ng’s Solo Hug which premiered 23 June at Hackney Showrooms:
“Dear Ting Ting… when you’re older, you’ll find people that love John Cage and Chinese Opera as much as you do…”
Dear Ting Ting, we’ve all found each other.